As a nuclear engineer who works for Westinghouse, I think you did a GREAT job with the comparisons between large, small, and renewables. I’d love to see a video on a comparison between nuscale, terrapower, and (possibly) rolls Royce’s designs and their applicability for the future
@@atomicblender One more idea for a video if you don’t mind. I think it would be really interesting to see how the “best” SMR design (perhaps not best but nuscale would probably provide best comparison since furthest along - I’ll leave that up to you lol) compares to the recent large asian designs (think APR-1400 or CAP-1000/Hualong One) in terms of which future customers would actually choose based on risk. I think there’s currently a pull for SMRs in the west but less so in the Asian markets where they’ve been very successful in staying within budget and on time. As they start to export this technology and expertise outside of their respective countries/markets (e.g. barakah), how are customers, particularly in the west, going to make this hard choice in the early days - AKA the coming years - between unproven tech vs proven. The whole crux of SMRs is you gotta sell a lot and this may end up being a huge barrier to entry for the SMR suppliers if this Q can’t be answered (how to convince customers to go with them over Asian designs)
@@MrLando1996 he mentioned in the current video the potential for a wider market for SMRs in countries like Estonia: Small countries, geographically isolated countries (sparse interconnections to wider area grids for frequency stability), countries looking to replace their aging coal- or shale-fired plants of similar thermal powrr with reduced wider infrastructure changes. We couldn't use a megawatt reactor: changing its power output is not rapid enough.
Nuclear energy is the MOST EXPENSIVE, the MOST DANGEROUS, the BIGGEST RISK from terrorism and the MOST CENTRALIZED and billionaire-owned form. Solar panels on every rooftop empowers everyone as their own power generation owners. There’s no comparison! End the radiation spewing into our oceans from Fukushima before supporting more nuclear power.
Being currently in the SMR industry, I think your assessment is accurate. To me the big thing is the financial risk for the owner is less because of the smaller size. The large plants with cost overruns nearly bankrupts large companies.
Exactly, smaller size lowers the overall risk to investors. $100M vs $10B is a lot easier to manage. It's funny you said cost overruns nearly bankrupt large companies. In an earlier draft of a video I did, I used almost that exact phrase (referring to the AP1000 projects in the US), but it ended up being cut. Anyway, cheers!
The SMR industry? Isn’t it bit strange to make that claim of an “SMR industry” when not a single commercial SMR is even started construction yet, not even a license?
@@albennett418 No. NuScale SMR design is approved by nrc, after twenty years and a $billion. The Nuscale construction license has not even been submitted yet, as that means spending more, and the NRC could destroy the company with a rejection. A great many RE interests will lobby to stop it, and the NRC board is loaded w a couple anti nuclear lawyers who would are likely to help the RE interest.
@13:12 im really impressed that some SMR's have the ability to reuse the fuel. Therefore the waste is vastly reduced. This is a HUGE difference between SMR's & traditional nuclear power plants.
Thank you for this clear explanation on SMR's. It is a pity that we can't use the enormous experience built up by the US Navy because that is secret. The reactors used in a aircraft carrier produces enough electricity for 7000 man and the propulsion of the ship but enables also the production of fresh water and bio fuel from seawater. These systems are working for over 50 years now. The knowledge and experience is there.
Fair point. Fortunately (or unfortunately) the US set its policy to not mix the military and civil nuclear programs. Not all countries do this, but there are areas like you mentioned where that experience would be very useful. Cheers!
It was (reportedly) ex-Navy nuclear reactor operators who took their "wisdom" to the Three Mile Island to a core meltdown. A Molten Salt Reactor can operate in a desert, water at ~2200 psi is not a happy thing. In an ocean not a problem, but comparing a land based Mega Watt reactor to a ship installation is a stretch. There are dozens of Gen4 propositions underway and avoiding water, for cooling, heat transfer, and moderation is a common feature. Molten salt reactors at low pressure avoids most of the fears of nuclear power. Nothing to explode.
But civilian reactors are based on military designs. Westinghouse, GE, Combustion Engineering and other vendors designed the military reactors systems and the companies scaled them for use in civilian applications. The major difference between them is the use of exotic materials that civilians can’t afford that the military uses. Civilian reactors use fuel that is enriched 4 to 5% U235, military reactors are enriched to weapons grade uranium. Low enrichment allows civilian reactors to use less expensive boron control rods, military reactors have to use more exotic materials due to the high enrichment levels. Civilian reactors run at 100% power for about 2 years, military reactors typically run at much lower levels. When I was a Navy RO on Sunday, we typically ran at 15 to 20% power all patrol because running at flank bells creates a lot of noise. In the 70’s a sub was refueled every decade or so, but if run at 100% power as civilian reactors do, they would have to be refueled every 2 years or so.
@@LSuschena 100% for 2 years or 20% for 10 years looks the same to me. It is not the fuel burn-up that causes the solid fuel to become unusable, but the trapped breakdown products that acts as neutron absorbers, and that is why the rods have to be re-shuffled and/or replaced as the ones in the center get more activity. That is one reason a liquid fuel reactor is better, as Xenon gas, and others can be separated out. Alvin Weinberg who designed the navy reactor also designed the MSR as he thought the light water reactor was unsuitable for commercial land use. He also designed the MSR for a Thorium breeding cycle, which incidentally has less problematic waste disposal profile. SMR's can conquer the biggest problem with nuclear reactors, the immense cost of to build and license them. Bankruptcy is a real problem for nuclear construction, as is unwarranted fear of them. Naval reactors don't scale well for the above reasons. The answer is MSR. Solid fuel is a mechanical device, liquid fuel is more like a chemical device, which opens a lot of possibilities for cleaning the fuel, an simpler on-line addition of new fuel.
Getting rid of intermittent power generation will remove unrecyclable solar panels, as well as removing wildlife killing machines (wind farms). Sounds fantastic to me.
Let’s be real about one thing in the west we built reactors in the 1960s in the 70s in the 80s. This is the same in Europe and then we stopped for 25 to 30 years. Now we’re trying to reboot these industries. The real impediment started around the time of the creation of the nuclear regulatory commission in the mid-1970s, at least in the United States case we did not pick a few designs, but we had many independent vendors building custom machines. Canada built multiple machine complexes at a few sites, concentrating and sharing facilities and personnel. This needs to happen in the United States and other countries we also depend on very large Forgings and pressure vessels for our light water, reactors SMR’s could provide some modularity to the construction of multi reactor complexes. But maybe new designs are needed. Overall, the Canadians have an excellent record with their CanDu reactors that require no enriched Uranium.
Agreed, the US went so long without building that all the experience was lost. Supporting industries like heavy forgings are overseas now, although that's not the end of the world. Canada is a great example, they have a lot of nuclear co-generating with hydro very nicely. Low-enriched uranium is also nice, but a downside is a bit more waste compared to enriched fuel.
@@atomicblender True, there are some new designs in the pipeline that are designed to consume, spend fuel and depleted uranium as fuel or a feedstock for fission product lines.
The US ceased building new reactors 'back then' because the costs were too high and were increasing. The costs are still too high, Look at what Vogtle 3&4 will have to charge for their electricity, And that's after the utility raised rates about six times in order to take money from customers to use for reactor construction. At some point nuclear advocates need to face reality, People will not willingly accept large increases in electricity prices just so some company can build a reactor. Here is what is likely to happen in Georgia. The new Vogtle reactors will come online. Rates will take a significant jump up. In the meantime we have become much more efficient in our use of electricity (LEDs, better refers, etc.) meaning that demand has not risen as was expected when work began on new nuclear. And the cost of solar has greatly decreased. Because GA will prioritize keeping nuclear going they will most likely shut down cheaper fossil fuel plants, putting more upward pressure on rates. As rates go up more and more consumers will install solar and storage for their homes and businesses. That will further lower demand, leaving GA with the need to cut generation. And unless they face reality and close one or both of the new reactors they will, again, have to increase rates.
Wind and Solar is heavily subsidized by the government. It also requires a back system for when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine. So add all those small natural gas fired plants to the cost of renewables.
Great rundown! Do LFTRs and pebble beds! Also, does cost take into account the size and length of transmission lines and their losses. Aren’t SMRs going to be much closer on average to where their power will be used, and therefore cheaper?
SMRs should, in theory, be able to be built closer or on previous sites (like coal or existing nuclear). This should be better than building super far away from where anyone lives.
An SMR could possibly fit inside/nearby to existing sub-stations using the existing wiring and transformers. Shorter, local-grid/buried wiring could minimize EMP danger.
Building reactor sites with room for numerous SMRs could fill the site with various experimental reactors to evaluate and provide excess capacity to allow taking problem reactors offline and perhaps fixing/modifying/improving them with robots. Military bases could be a good place to site these facilities.
Fluoride can indeed be used as a solvent for uranium, including the separation of U233 from molten salts in a molten salt reactor. However, the feasibility of this approach depends on several factors. One factor to consider is the chemical properties of fluoride. Fluoride ions are highly reactive, and they can react with many substances, including metals. This reactivity can be an advantage in separating uranium from other metals in the molten salt, but it can also lead to corrosion of the reactor materials, which is a significant challenge in designing and operating a molten salt reactor. Another factor to consider is the radioactivity of the materials involved. Separating U233 from molten salts is a complex process that involves handling highly radioactive materials, which requires significant safety measures and specialized equipment. The use of fluoride as a solvent can also produce radioactive waste, which must be carefully managed and disposed of. Despite these challenges, fluoride-based methods have been studied and developed for separating U233 from molten salts in molten salt reactors. Research has shown that fluoride-based methods can be effective in separating U233, but further development and testing are needed to determine their practicality and feasibility in large-scale commercial applications.
A state with excellent wind and solar resources. How do you pitch the deal of paying more than necessary for electricity? You've got no actual cost for SMR electricity. NuScale now states $0.08 to $0.10/kWh if they can get financing to build their design. That sort of price isn't competitive in Texas.
Thank you! Great to gain insight into a complex scenario without the need for an Engineering degree! I'm looking forward to learning more from your diligent information gathering and presenttion. Nice!
This is a great introductory video. Something that the video doesn't bring out so clearly is that for a lot of these questions the answer is really: it depends. SMR is a business model not a reactor design and different SMR designs can actually be very different. As just one example: water cooled designs like NuScale actually don't work well with intermittent renewables. This is because of economics: yes NuScale can scale the output, but only by throttling the reactor. However, a nuclear reactor costs essentially the same whether you run it at 100% or 10%. Meaning when NuScale throttles output by 50% they are halving their income but their costs are exactly the same: greatly hampering the plant economics. The same is not true of high-temperature reactors, such as TerraPower's Natrium or Molten Salt Reactor designs because the high temperatures allow the use of thermal energy storage: they can run the reactor at 100% all the time and store the excess energy for later. These designs are a perfect compliment for intermittent renewables and they do not compete with each other economically in the same way. Indeed for a lot of these questions the answer actually comes to do "It depends on the specifics of the design": you could take each of the questions you've asked and get completely different answers for different SMR designs. Personally I'm not especially optimistic for water-cooled SMR designs like NuScale, although I'm happy to be proven wrong. However, I think high-temperature designs such as Natrium, Moltex, ThorCon, Kairos, etc. have a lot more potential advantages. Overall it'll be interesting to see how this space develops over the next few years.
They are such a great way to go. You can install them where you have a localized high demand. Like a large factory, for an entire university, disaster areas, and so forth.
I really really hope this Flourishes. I greatly appreciate your video. I hope people get on board with this new era of advanced nuclear energy options.
Excellent well balanced video. When talking about renewables and stating their low cost, we should perhaps also add in the extra cost of a backup solution which is needed to be available so when the wind doesn't blow / sun doesn't shine etc.. i.e. Solar plus batteries / wind plus hydrogen storage etc.
Good point, I did see some statistics on adding storage but then the sources became more varied and it was more difficult to do a comparison. I think that's something to revisit. Cheers!
Great video! Could you please do a piece on MSRs from ThorCon or Moltex (the latter should play well with renewables). These guys are on track to solve some of the waste problems.
@@dominikvonlavante6113 Safety and waste (safe waste ..?) are the same problem, how do you know future g e n e r a t i o n s will have the means to handle it ... (uneasy handling of Tritium : 9621 Curies/gr). What about monitoring, sampling, analyzing food from certain localities ...
Please tell us more about Terrestrial Energy. They seem to be in the best position to get small modular molten salt reactors online the fastest. Where are they at with that?
Terrapower was supposed to build their MSR 2 years ago but ran into a problem because their fuel was Russian sourced. Even though they received $2 billion in taxpayer matching funds, Billionaire Bill Gates just got the taxpayer to fork over another 125 million to make the fuel here in the U.S. The real problem is that the estimate for his 345 Mw reactor is $4 billion even before it is built. And to be anywhere cost effective with other power producing methods nuclear MUST be less than $6 billion for a 1,000 Mw unit. Of course they say it will become cheaper in the future but has that ever happened?
It makes no sense for any nuclear power plant, large or small, to "fill in" for "renewables" when the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing. "Renewables" might make sense when they replace power from plants that use combustion as a source of energy, but it's utterly irrational to use them to displace power from a nuclear plant.
Breeder reactor features include the ability to use "spent" fuel rods and use 90% of the remaining original uranium as well as changing isotopes in the waste to less radioactive elements with much shorter half lives.
A lot of the cost comparisons leave out what invested money could have done to create more money since it took decades to build. I’ve read multiple times this is why a lot of places won’t do it. If it costs $60MWH but your money was tied up for 10-20 years then the reality is that you could have used that money to make money. Which is why it makes more sense to build something that only takes a few years. So that’s a huge advantage to these SMRs if these actually work out.
True. Capital carrying costs *should* be captured in the LCOE or Overnight, but not always. In either case, ROI will decline for loooong delayed projects. Hopefully SMRs address that shortcoming. Cheers!
More specifically I'd like to see wind and solar with energy storage costs attached. I think then you could get a good baseline against coal, has, and nuclear.
While the RR SMR is not technically an SMR due to its size at 470MW it has been designed to the maximum diameter of the reactor for road transportation under bridges etc. clearly RR saw that size does matter in terms of economics, something others are learning the hard way. They are adopting the modular manufacturing etc. A video reviewing the RR approach wrt SMR vs mid vs large would be interesting. It would be good to also include a chapter on Sheffield Forge Masters new welding tech designed specifically to reduce the fabrication time while increasing quality of nuclear reactor vessels. Great channel. I have worked on the JET project and for nuclear operators and I am still learning and your channel is very insightful and well researched and presented. Good effort. Carry on.
I'd agree, when I first saw the RR SMR, I said, "That's neither small nor modular. But it is a reactor." It has some modularity like you said and I didn't realize they had designed largest components to be transportable on normal roads. That helps a lot in siting and construction expense since it should reduce lead times and delays. I saw the Sheffield new welding approach, but I haven't had a chance to look into it more. If it's as good as they claim, that's huge and I don't know why there wasn't more press. A video on the economics of S vs M vs L would be super interesting (at least to me!). I'll keep that idea on my list. Cheers!
I'm just discovering your channel, and I love the Thorium and LSR explorations you did. I would love a deep dive into deep geothermal, as it seem to be the best of all worlds.
A lot of technical factors seem important for SMRs but they’re secondary issues. By far the largest issue w any kind of new nuclear tech in the US (or Europe) is the regulator, the US NRC. The NRC is malevolent, has not approved a single US reactor from start to finish so far. Every single operational US reactor saw its first proposal under the former AEC. Until the NRC is reformed, all the new appealing features of SMR like safety, and apparent cost savings … don’t matter if the NRC delays approval, or worse, approves the plant and then afterwards demands changes (as it did w Vogtle), or, demands some ridiculously large staff per every small reactor unit. For some reason most in the industry are reluctant to call out the NRC on its obstructions, nor do media commentators point out the central problem which is the NRC. The NRC just rejected the ultra small design of Oklo, and rejected the extension license of a long existing plant in Florida, which the NRC had *already* approved. Until this problem is confronted, even well informed and prudent pro/common videos are a waste of time.
@@memback My point is simple; new nuclear, at least in the U.S. , is 2 to 3 times the cost of other power production methods. So why diversify power methods with one that is much more expensive than all the others. Simple fact in the U.S. NO NEW NUCLEAR POWER plants are planned while hundreds of solar and wind farms are actually being built in 2023.
A really good basic explanation of SMRs and their comparison to other means of electricity generation. However there are a number of factors that should be taken into account when comparing costs. Firstly the time value of money which means electricity in terms of levelised costs is higher for nuclear stations that take 20 years to build rather than 7 years. Secondly the cost of offshore wind should take into account both capital costs and transmission losses of having to connect for example offshore wind in remote locations to the grid. This compares to SMRs which can be built at existing connections to the grid at the sites of old coal and nuclear stations closer to population centres. And thirdly the levelised costs of renewables with intermittency e.g. sun and wind, need to include the backup generation capital and running costs e.g. using open cycle gas turbines for backup. In other words the costs of generating electricity when the wind doesn't blow and the sun does not shine.
Usually LCOE and Overnight Capital take into account interest charges and such. Higher or lower discount rates could be applied and ROI would decline if a project takes longer than expected. That's one of the things SMRs should address, at least somewhat, is the looooong build times of big plants. Cheers!
Seeing how the X-Energy XE-100 SMR works, it's pretty interesting. With Dow buying them for electricity and steam output, these SMRs can be used for much more than just powering the grid.
Reality (sort-of since none have been even built yet in the U.S.) This is from the Des Moines Register an concerning the only Small Modular Reactor (SMR) project in the U.S. today. It should be noted that NuScale said this month (Jan/2023) the target price for power from the plant is $89 per megawatt hour, up 53% from the previous estimate of $58 per MW hour In 2013, the Wall Street firm Lazard estimated that the cost of generating electricity at a new nuclear plant in the United States will be between $86 and $122 per megawatt-hour. Last November, Lazard estimated that the corresponding cost will be between $131 and $204 per megawatt-hour based upon the 4 recent new nuclear projects in the U.S. . During the same eight years, renewables have plummeted in cost, and the 2021 estimates of electricity from newly constructed utility-scale solar and wind plants range between $26 and $50 per megawatt-hour. Nuclear power is simply not economically competitive. SMRs will be even less competitive. Building and operating SMRs will cost more than large reactors for each unit (megawatt) of generation capacity. A reactor that generates five times as much power will not require five times as much concrete or five times as many workers. This makes electricity from small reactors more expensive; many of the original small reactors built in the United States were financially uncompetitive and shut down early. The estimated cost of constructing a plant with 600 megawatts of electricity from NuScale SMRs, arguably the design closest to deployment in the United States, was originally advertised as costing $1 billion but upon requesting actual bids from engineering firms, increased to $6.1 billion in 2020. Given inflation and other cost constraints that cost today can only be expected to be significantly higher. The cost was so high that ten members of Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems canceled their contracts. NuScale then changed its proposed plant configuration to 6 fewer reactors but increased each reactor output from 50 Mw to 77 Mw costing at total of $5.3 billion. The NRC just last week approved the construction of the 50 Mw design but now will have to start the review process all over given the switch to a 77 Mw design. For each kilowatt of electrical generation capacity, that estimate is around 80% more than the per-kilowatt cost of the Vogtle project in Georgia - before its cost exploded from $14 billion to over $30 billion. Based on the historical experience with nuclear reactor construction, SMRs are very likely to cost much more than initially expected. And they now have delayed the project start until 2025 in an attempt to find more backers. All this before the inevitable setbacks that will occur once construction starts.
Point Lepreau CANDU reactors in NB are installing one SMR as a field pilot project with the intent to reuse some of the on site stored spent fuel which still has 90% useful energy that could not be extracted with the earlier Gen CANDU reactor. The engineering of the reactor was done a long time ago.
Distributed generation has become a beneficial concept in industry. SMRs will make this available on the utilities electric distribution level. Increased resilience, less dependence on vulnerable grids, etc., etc.
The use of "renewables" in poorer nations has been costly, unreliable, and conflict-producing enterprises. In particular the use of hydro dams. Conflicts have arisen between China and, India, China and Vietnam, Egypt and Ethiopia, Turkey and Syria, and a myriad of other areas. Find a dam on a river crossing multiple nations and there is a potential conflict. The use of SMRs seems to be a reasonable solution. The safeguards of low-grade waste and storage of material can be safeguards put in place. These safeguards seem a better option than the guaranteed conflict caused by the use of very expensive hydroelectric dams.
You talked about the possibility to install does SMRs in cities or close to big consumers, also in a combination for renewables. But how fast can they react? Can you start them up and shut them down in a short time? The other part I was missing is how secured is the fuel, when the world starts using much more nuclear power how long does the uranium last?
All nuclear power plants are base load plants. Either 0% power or 100% power. Nuclear power plants need large cooling water bodies and emergency plans to evacuate people in an emergency. That is why some nuclear plants near large populations were shutdown because they could not evacuate large numbers of people
There is a demonstration project being built in tennessee. I don't remember who the Builder is. That would make a good video going into that particular one
I believe TVA is trying to license the GE Hitachi BWRX-300. The same one has started construction in Ontario and I believe they are trying for a license in the UK
Great but not going anywhere till the regulations are changed. One thing not mentioned about cost is the electric waste and cost of transporting electricity. With SMR's those costs are way down as they can be way closer to the demand of the electricity. Factories that use a ton of power could install one and have very reliable power.
Regulations, at least in the US, are directed too much towards light water reactors and NRC has struggled to adapt to anything else. Momentum is a powerful thing.
Standardization is a first step to cost reduction. You need a standard size, shape and interface. You also need standardized teats for safety and function. Then multiple suppliers can compete on fair terms.
Every reactor that the U.S. currently operates is a standard design, be it Westinghouse, CE, or B&W. The NRC has to approve a reactor design so it is not like they are all different.
5:32 passive cooling makes sense for smaller and smaller reactors because smaller things can't stay warm like large things. I can only guess that a reactor for a single home will not need any cooling at all.
The USA tried that back in the late 60's. If you read the final report, they listed many total roadblocks-- even at just 10% of the neutron flux needed, many components broke down. Lots of major stopping-points.
@@georgegonzalez2476 that's not what I heard about the Oakridge unit. It ran for many months; yes lots of blocks, but none that are insurmountable. needs funding, good research. It will be with us well before 2030
@@mrstevecox7 Go read the actual final report. www.osti.gov/biblio/4372873 used the most exotic alloys they could find, and the thing irretrievably broke down in just a very few months at around 10% of the economical flux level. Many other issues that they had no solution for then or now. Servicing the valves and heat-exchangers was impossible due to the deadly remnant radiation levels. The one similar reactor that they French tried, it needed FOUR ACRES of reprocessing buildings, running continuously, to filter out the worst of the fission products. In a production reactor you would need those buildings at least duplicated so there would always have a chance of having one running reprocessing facility at all times. A huge no-go technically, operationally, and economically.
Very informative! SMRs are the future. Nuclear fusion is also promising and might be the key to complementing intermittent renewables without depending on fossil fuels and large storage.
I'm betting on India or Israel being the first to step in with both feet. Both have access to all technology needed, and the strong motivation to create a new paradigm for energy independence for their people. I'm pretty sure the molten salt designs will win out, and we might even see sealed systems small enough to transport the modular assembly within a few sealed shipping containers. One benefit that wasn't discussed here, but which REALLY needs to be addressed is the concept of distribution power generation. Rolling blackouts are an inevitability of large central generating. More, smaller generators are necessary to stabilize the growing power needs. SMRs are one of the few options that meets the high energy density and stable production requirements here.
I would like a deep dive on why the nuclear regulatory commission can’t seem to allow reactors to be built on time/on budget. I think it needs to be abolished and replaced with something more like the atomic energy commission. Why is nuscale behind schedule on its demonstration reactor?
The NRC only requires utilities to build nuclear power plants according to design. The AEC has NOT existed for 50 years. Here is the bad NRC actually expecting Vogtle nuclear plant to x-ray critical welds and actually test safety system...how dare they !!! Below is the Vogtle Project Management's answer for the latest delays: Southern Co. yesterday announced another delay for its long-troubled nuclear construction project in Georgia, edging its costs closer to the $30 billion mark. The setback could now push the startup date for Plant Vogtle’s first reactor until early 2023 and move the date for the second one to later that year. Plant Vogtle’s latest move highlights the nuclear industry’s chief troubles with building large, baseload reactors: safety and cost. To be clear, Southern executives have blamed this new hiccup on paperwork, saying that workers were gathering it to send to federal safety regulators and noticed critical inspection records were missing or incomplete. The pile of missing or incomplete documents added up to a delay of three to six months, Southern said. That additional time is costing $920 million. “We’re a little frustrated with the latest developments,” Southern Co. CEO Tom Fanning talked of “great momentum” at the construction site since November. But workers realized “tens of thousands” of critical documents were missing, leading to a three-month backlog. “We’re fixing that part of the ‘paper’ process,” he told E&E News.
@@clarkkent9080 You are a Nuclear industry worker and you have a bias for the use of nuclear reactors that's on full display here. You told on yourself as being an operator of 3 different PWRs of which released massive amounts of various effluents into the biota. Why didn't you then act on that knowledge and shut your reactors down being that those effluents, especially Organically Bound Tritium from the tritium releases, caused so many peoples cancer while you cash your salary check? It doesn't matter which design, fuel or coolants you wish was being used because they simply aren't and now globally nuclear accounts for single digits of our energy production and beginning to fall even further with much less subsidies going to the nuclear industry than before. What is the difference in half-life of tritium at 12-30 days versus Organically Bound Tritium?
What do you know about the progress of micro reactors? Having a reactor design that is road-transportable and can fit within a single sea can would be incredibly useful for industry.
great summary .... not sure if you included cost of transmission/distribution which is a massive cost for most implementations.... with existing distribution systems and transmission systems, would SMR's not be more cost efficient in deploying additional capacity closer to loads,.... whereas large Nuclear and Green will need massive investments in new Transmission.
6:36 a BIG item in your explanation of LCOE which you left out is the "discount rate". This is roughly speaking the return on investment expected over time aka the interest rate of the capital investment. Nuclear is a bigger investment, so if there is a larger discount and rate the costs are artificially high because of that. As well, LCOE usually does not address nuclear's benefits after 40 years. You can see these start to appear in some LCOE reports as "fully depreciated nuclear". With municipal projects that "return on investment" should be much lower. After all you wouldn't buy a bridge with a credit card and government bonds dot not pay out like the stock market.
Vogtle units 3/4 have a principal loan of $31-32 billion with ~$1 billion per year interest. Southern company just asked for a 600 million dollar rate increase for unit 3 and I assume they will ask for the same for unit 4. Electric rates will at least double. Reliable power at a cost few can afford. Please explain why old fully paid for nuclear plants are shutting down every year when investor owned utilities say they are not cost effective??
@@clarkkent9080 1. high labor costs, 2. low fracked gas prices in the US, 3. construction delays / bad supply chain / bad subcontractors (just like happens in EVERY municipal project), 4. regulatory delays (thanks to Jaczko the grifter)
@@soyattle Simple point: Hundreds of solar farms, wind farms, gas turbines are being built in the U.S. every year, no problems there. No U.S. utility is even considering new nuclear that takes 16 years to complete. Doesn't matter the reason, those are the facts. PS Jaczko has been gone for 11 years. When are you going to stop using that excuse and replacing it with facts. Fact #1 Trump completely canceled Yucca Mountain Fact #2 Trump completely canceled the MOX project Fact #3 Trump refused to support VC Summer and ut was canceled in 2017 Fact #4 Trump allowed the fraud and waste to continue at Vogtle now 110% over budget and schedule.
@@soyattle I don't know if there is one word to correctly describe trump but your word is close. You brought up Jaczko from 11 years ago and that is usually a partisan republican trying to blame Democrats' for all nuclear's problems. In response, I only point out that republicans are not without sin. I worked on the MOX facility some and I give trump credit. That project was a money pit that was never going to run and trump was the only one who could shut Linsey Graham down. Linsey is personally responsible for the project failure.
I saw 2 points you brought up that are caused by fear mongering instead of actual fact. 1. The waste nuclear reactors produce is actually really small Fuel rods are 4% fissionable material, each rod usually last 5 years and after they're finished about 4 % of the fuel rod actually becomes waste. The actual global weight of waste each year is about 10.000 metric tons which may seem like alot but that's about 500 m3 per year which means you could fit 100s of years worth of nuclear waste in a couple of warehouses. 2. Proliferation Like I mentioned nuclear fuel is about 4% fissionable material For any explosive weapons you need upwards of 90% Which needs massive processing plants that costs billions So that's also a fear mongering argument
"In any system of energy, Control is what consumes energy the most. No energy store holds enough energy to extract an amount of energy equal to the total energy it stores. No system of energy can deliver sum useful energy in excess of the total energy put into constructing it. This universal truth applies to all systems. Energy, like time, flows from past to future".
Another great job! Your analogy of the swimmer is absolutely spot on. LCOE is an oft overused and misused metric. I could push back some on your score card based on individual MsR designs as I believe certain designs hold exceptional promise. But overall a balanced view. I would however push back a bit more firmly on renewables tho. They have a place but I feel it is much smaller than generally believed. There is far too much hype in the renewables world. Farming energy is only slightly better than farming in general on EROI. We need an EROI that’s much higher than they offer to sustain society! The breathing room in excess energy out offered by fossil fuels that powers our world is just not going to be replaced by renewables. For more I recommend Vaclav Smil’s book “How the World really works”. Another good critique of renewables is Meredith Angwin’s “Shorting the Grid”. It’s time to stop “kissing the ring” of the Renewables propaganda machine and tell the truth. Nuclear needs to be the backbone of our energy system if we really want to decarbonize.
Thanks! I can't fully claim credit for the swimmer, I heard that somewhere else but I liked it as a way to keep in mind why we might pay more for certain things. I see nuclear as the reliable baseload to renewables, at least in the near to medium term. More advanced nuclear designs, or even fusion, have more promise but will take time. I'll check out the books you mentioned. Cheers!
Great balanced presentation thank you. I appreciate this is a presentation comparing smr with large nuclear so these following comments are directed at expanding options to be looked at and compared with. Geothermal, hydro and perhaps tidal generators should be included as an option as well as the option of storage units such as battery or heat sink sand storage for heating to be coupled with intermittent sources like solar or wind. Again a very good explanation and well balanced. Perhaps a next video on a comparison of all the old and new non fossil fuel sources
Wind and solar are now, by far, the least expensive ways to generate electricity and their cost is expected to continue to decline. Lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries are dropping in cost rapidly and have extremely long cycle lifes which makes storage very affordable. This is what any nuclear solution has to work against. And don't forget. Nuclear needs both storage and backup generation. Nuclear is not good at load following and if you reduce reactor output to match demand then the cost of electricity produced increases. Cost per MWh = total cost / total output. The nuclear plant needs to run at max output and use some sort of storage to park unneeded output for use during peak demand periods. We built a lot of pump up hydro storage back in the days when we were building reactors in the US. And reactors frequently go offline unscheduled. There has to be some sort of generation standing by to make up for the loss. Most likely that's going to be a CCNG plant. And the cost of those plants and their fuel has to be folded into the true cost of nuclear produced electricity.
Large scale nuclear reactors were only economical when the US government heavily subsidized the industry. When the US government began to slow down the production of nuclear weapons, the money dried up and TMI caused a lot of hysteria, killing the economy of scale as construction projects were all canceled. Fukushima's meltdowns occurred because the staff was inadequately trained in how the emergency cooling system worked. There was a system designed to passively remove heat from the reactor even with a total loss of onsite power. BUT if you shut the system off and lose all power, the system cannot be reactivated. They shut the passive cooling system off, lost all power, and could not reactivate it. This is a piece of information you rarely hear in Western media but was admitted in a Japanese documentary by NHK years ago. The Idaho National Laboratory actually developed a reactor called the Integral Fast Reactor in the 1980's that was designed from the outset to leverage physics to make it impossible to have a meltdown. They could shut the coolant feed pumps off with the emergency shutdown system disabled, which would result in a meltdown with a traditional reactor design. The Integral Fast Reactor's temperature would spike, reactivity would drop, and the system would slowly shut itself down naturally, no meltdown. They tested all the worst case scenarios involving loss of cooling and the reactor always went into a natural shutdown state once it couldn't reject heat. INL also developed the IFR Fuel Reprocessing Facility which demonstrated the concept of a closed fuel cycle. No more worrying about spent fuel casks piling up on site waiting for transport to a storage site. Instead the Fuel Reprocessing Facility would reprocess spent fuel on-site. It demonstrated that the plant could recycle the fuel on-site and continue to re-use it again and again for the life of the plant. It was canceled in 1994 after overwhelming pressure from know-nothing politicians like John Kerry. Many of these politicians demanded the IFR program be shut down because they were in the pocket of the coal and petroleum industry that were threatened by the idea of nuclear power plants that could generate massive amounts of power without risk of a meltdown and would be able to re-use the same fuel for the life of the plant. The frustrating thing is that the cost of nuclear energy is often what gets brought up in criticisms of its use as a source of energy. The US government spent $100 billion dollars over the last 70 years on subsidies for nuclear power. The US government has already blown way past that on subsidies for wind and solar in a fraction of the time. The US government spent $55 billion on "green" energy projects in 2019 alone. If they had continued to invest in the IFR and continued development, we wouldn't be invading foreign countries on the other side of the planet today in order to take their rare earth metals for short-lived solar panel projects that are highly intermittent and equally toxic and damaging to the environment.
Low natural gas costs are quickly becoming a thing of the past. Low cost natural gas generation forced the closure of smaller nuke plants. Nukes will be back.
Wind and solar don't incude the massive energy storage costs that need to be included, and they don't include the cost of dunkerflaute and therefore the need for additional capacity. If your expected wind farm generates 1 GW of power, well really you need to generate 1.3 GW of power to account for capacity shortages over a long period of time like a big storm that covers the entire country or something.
10:00 This cost to build per kW chart includes wind generators as if they are independent generators which they are not. Wind generators have to have their power output conditioned to grid quality typically by NGCC plants and can not provide power grid capacity because they may not be operational at all times. 10:16 $11 MWh NG without carbon capture is $0.011 kWh or 1.1¢ kWh. That is considerably cheaper than the cost of NG fuel at $5 mmBTU. $5 per mmBTU NG, 273 kWh = mmBTU, 50% efficiency NGCC power plant (273 kWh/$5) X (1/273)/(1/273) = 1 kWh/$0.018. 100% efficiency NGCC plant 50% efficiency 1 kWh/$0.018 X 1/2 = 1 kWh/$0.036 or 1 MWh/$36 With wholesale prices for NG in 2022-12-22 hovering a bit above $5 mmBTU in the USA a reasonable estimate for fueling a natural gas combined cycle plant is $36 per MWh which much higher than the levelized cost of $11 per MWh show in this chart. Even when NG was for a brief time at $2 mmBTU this would of only put the fueling costs at 2/5 of $36 MWh or $14.4 MWh. This is just fuel cost of NG! No physical plant costs included. NG is no longer cost competitive with coal as a fuel for generating electric power which it had been increasingly since 2008. The chart at 10:00 shows coal plants are 2 - 3 times more expensive to build per kW than NGCC plants. The estimates for coal plant cost per kWh appear low. 2005 estimates I've seen in reports placed new coal plants at around $4,000 kW with prices going up so fast contracts were not able to give a guaranteed cost estimate causing few contracts to be singed. New modern coal plants produce almost no environmentally harmful air emissions and are much more efficient than the bulk of older USA operating coal plants. A modern new coal generating plant could have fueling costs close to 1¢ kWh. The do need to be of large scale to spread their large crewing costs over a large plant. The mining of coal and handling of coal The big question is what is going to happen to the long term cost of natural gas in the USA.
I keep wondering what is happening to Kirk Sorensen, who was on the forefront of the revival of SMRs with his LFTR design about 20 years ago. Flibe Energy seems to be alive, but I don't understand how is it possible that they still do not have a design ready for production and mostly: why are they not in the news?? Also: from what I understand, there is at least one working LFTR in India. What's going on with with SMRs in India and China?
Maybe it is because Sorensen is a snake oil salesman and Bill Gates told him, NOT INTERESTED" when he tried to push Thorium in Terrapower's Natrium MSR
I checked their web site yesterday and very little information on their progress is published. It is understandable that they do not have a design ready. Their goal is too aggressive and too many problems to be conquered. Their initial proposal calls for online chemical re-processing. This online reprocessing thing may take them decades to fulfill.
A lot of momentum and serious money behind this sector....I can tell you that a lot of engineers in the sector are hoping it's promises materialise. We have to try! And then there is their application in space/ Mars exploration.
There's a lot of nuance that cant fit in a convenient run time. the overnight cost thing tends to be a bit fuzzy. a properly designed large-scale reactor could potentially run for a 100 years. but you might have to pay that overnight cost 3-5x in the same period for wind, solar or SMR. Sealed SMRs have a wide variety of run times 6-20 years but generally, it's only a portion of the overnight costs. the overnight costs might be quite a bit lower if we build SMRs on the site of old coal plants which already have steam turbines. Financing costs on a full-scale reactor rack up insane amounts of interest because the payback doesn't start for a decade. SMRs deployed in say 5 years at a lower cost save a lot on interest and it might be possible in a few cases to build them loan free.
True, early designs were smaller and then everyone moved to larger to take advantage of the bigger output. I don't think SMRs are trying to compete or directly replace large plants, they're filling more of a rapid response role that can be built more easily.
By using smaller reactors, you can change the economy of scale for manufacturing those reactors. Large reactors would be built across the country if the US government subsidized nuclear like they have "green" energy like wind and solar in recent years. They have spent roughly $500 billion on "climate and green energy" projects in just the last few years. They spent just $100 billion total in the last 70 years on nuclear power subsidies and John Kerry lead the call for shutting down projects like the Integral Fast Reactor at Idaho National Laboratory in 1994 because they claimed it was a waste of money. The Integral Fast Reactor was a proven design that could not melt down even if you shut off all the safety systems and shut all the cooling pumps off. It was designed to be inherently meltdown proof and the design featured a fuel processing facility attached to it that could recycle the same fuel over and over again. The fuel that it started up with would be the same fuel (more or less) that it shuts down with when the plant is retired. It shows the ignorance of our politicians. Waste hundreds of billions covering agricultural land with toxic solar panels that are intermittent energy sources and leave behind land that's polluted with cables, concrete, pipes, insulation, etc.
Why does it still take 1-2 years to build them in a factory? Is that due to low volume boutique production, regulatory inspections at different production phases, complexity, or what? If the factory were making 500 a year would there still be a 2 year latency from start to completion?
Good question. It would depend on how many were needed to be produced. Boeing can take a high-demand design, like the 737, and make one in about two weeks because the production is streamlined and constant. Lower demand takes more time. Since no one has these factories yet, everything is estimated. So we'll have to see. Cheers!
Even if you can make the reactor in 2 weeks (per the 737 comment), the _plant_ would still need to be built - foundations, structures, turbine installation, switchyards, etc.
So, after (for example) uranium ore has been mined, what plants and money is used to convert it (flourination), enrich it and produce commercial grade nuclear rods, suitable for use? If the uranium ore is crushed, how do the industry players avoid health issues and pollution at the crushing plants? What security is in place to stop terrorists stealing the crushed ore (for dirty bombs) at the start of the cycle?
Usable fusion is 10 to 30 (or more) years away according to the people who have achieved a very short burst of fusion output. Then there's the problem of how to use the heat produced to produce affordable electricity. Our two most expensive ways of generating electricity involve heat to drive steam turbines. New coal and new nuclear cost multiple times that of wind, solar, and CCNG. The market will only buy what is most affordable.
As a former nuclear engineer, I have to say that SMRs are unfortunately dead on arrival until nuclear regulations are completely scrapped and replaced with regulations that are built around passively ensuring safety during core damage events. Equally, SMRs are dead on arrival as long as I cannot use ASME Section VIII (conventional pressure vessels) for everything.
The biggest factor to the proliferation of SMRs is the US's control of nuclear fuel. I visited Toshiba's prototype 4S facility in Yokohama and spoke with the senior management. Although a 20 megawatt unit can be produced for $5 million once in mass production, the nuclear fuel could run as high as $80 million because of the IAEA and AEC's control. I envision Russia becoming a major player in this market as they have zero restrictions on the fuel. I suggested to management that Toshiba approach North Korea for fuel but they're afraid of the US's reaction. Again, greed is prohibiting the adoption of game changing energy solutions...
Very well and concisely presented. Thank you. I call attention to the elimination of pumps. That would mean natural convection is crucial for heat transfer. I have patented IP for a new convective heat transfer paradigm. It causes a fluid to impinge heat transfer surfaces without impinging the packing, creating the same ideal pressure drop per superficial meter of travel as no packing at all (no parasitic losses) for a given heat transfer coefficient - but at 10-20% of the velocity as with no packing or impingement. By using a much lower aspect ratio, the inlet-to-outlet distance and pressure drop is reduced 80-90% for the same heat transfer coefficient. We have accurate measurements and manufacturing for a new class of heat exchanger with other benefits. By the way, I developed it for catalytic reactors constrained by heat transfer and pressure drop in the other SMRs (steam methane reformers). Perhaps you or your fans could direct me to help out. THANKS. Jon
forced circulation is used to increase power output. All PWRs can operate under natural circulation but at less than 5% rated power output. You could change designs to increase this but WHY when installing a simple pump solves the problem????
@@clarkkent9080 O thanks, mild-mannered reporter. The UA-cam video mentioned that it was a beneficial for SMRs to not require pumps and rotating equipment because they can fail. I might have misunderstood.
@@jonathanfeinstein6997 The Terrapower Natrium reactors does use pumps. One of the problems with MSR is maintaining the salt molten. Solidified salt in all the piping and components would be a major problem. In any case, lets wait until the Natrium reactor operates for a few years before corporate propaganda can be stated as fact
@@clarkkent9080 That is helpful information. Thanks. I am already in my 70's though. How significant do you think it would be to lower the pressure drop by a factor of about 7 for the same heat transfer coefficient.? Would people jump at that?
@@jonathanfeinstein6997 I worked in the nuclear industry for 40+ years at five different facilities and am also now retired. I am not sure what you mean by pressure drop. U.S. PWRs when operating at 100% power, operate very close to the melting point of the fuel cladding. If you watch a pot of water begin to boil, you will first see small steam bubbles form at the bottom of the pot, then break free and as they rise the steam bubble collapses as it cools. This is a very efficient form of heat transfer as steam contains significantly more energy than hot water. In a reactor core at 100% power, these steam bubbles are formed on the fuel clad surface and swept away by the forced (pump) coolant flow where they collapse and give up their energy to the coolant (very efficient). Steam is also a good insulator and if they are not swept away from the cladding, it would overheat and melt. All reactors are designed to keep the core cooled by natural circulation (if the pumps fail) but with a reactor trip when the power output from radioactive decay is less than 5% power. so plainly put, pumps allow for power levels that are 20 time higher.
Excellent video. I do wonder why nobody ever mentions the savings that would result from not having to build hundreds of miles of high tension power lines, and their maintenance
How about the Department of Defence using SMR at awkward land base sites as they have plenty of money, and experience with nuclear ships, and it would improve logistics?
Thanks for this concise analysis. An additional consideration has arisen in recen months. With the latest developments in warfare, where civilian infrastructure is now considered a legitimate target for cheap drone weapons, a more distributed approach to the provision of all utilities would seem to be a sensible course for the future, especially when combined with your discussion on complementary renewable sources. SMRs seem to fit the spec. for power at least. Perhaps if CHP could be included in the package, for urban installations at least, SMRs would be a sufficiently attractive option.
@@libearl828 Well, that’s the whole point. Multiple smaller, localised power installations, without vulnerable long distance supply networks would make much harder targets than the current setup, which are highly vulnerable to relatively minor damage, and which take out multiple other utilities, like water, sewage and transport when they go down. They could also be buried and located away from their intended use. Fairly easy to protect from drone attack as well, if needed. Not hard to build in redundancy either, similar to computer storage architecture, but with each unit located a short distance from its cluster.
The reason small pressurized water reactors are a good idea is that they are inherently safe as Dr Weinberg explained in his 2003 interview. He said, "Below 500MWth, in the case of a sudden shutdown, they can dissipate the heat of nuclear decay passively." Unfortunately, Westinghouse, GE and B&W engineers thought they can build bigger for economy of scale profits and use defence in-depth engineering. That worked as well as the accelerated bridge construction at FIU. Engineer brain block ego is no fun.
I operated many different types of reactors. One, a 1.000 Mw B&W (three Mile Island sister plant) tripped from 100% power when we lost all 4 reactor coolant pumps due to a grid upset. The plant safely kept the reactor passively cool on natural circulation for 1 hour until we investigated and restarted forced cooling. Every PWR in the U.S. can trip and cooldown on natural circulation but you do need feedwater which is provided by diesel backed electric and steam drive aux feedwater pumps. The latest AP1000 passive PWR does not need diesels but still need battery power for instrumentation and controls.
As has been publisized, there is interest here in the Philippines...Companys that are looking to expand to other countries now have a reason to contact the government here and talk with them.....From what I have been able to read there are companys like ThorCon and Moltex (yes I saw the comment below) who are really close in development to both shore based and land based plants as well as Rolls Royce who is active in advertizment of their SMR's
Philippines is an interesting case, with the possibility of restarting work in the near future. SMRs could be a good option, so we'll have to see if anything happens.
Coal-fired units are definitely not always as small as SMRs Each of the units at the Rockport coal power plant were one thousand three hundred megawatts. The largest unit at the John Amos coal power plant is the same size.
Great video - I'd love to hear more about SMR reactor availability in Africa, and especially countries with lots of need for electricity. In particular, what are the regulatory/proliferation challenges of dropping an SMR in - say - Namibia. Could we see these nations get a stable energy source that's easy on the planet?
I think they signed a letter of intent or memorandum of understanding or similar. Nothing concrete yet, at least from what I've heard, but it changes a lot.
Very informative & well done on video. I am thankful that nuclear is still being produced & improved. At the least much more electricity will be needed as more electric vehicles are being produced. At the best, I can see the day that very small nuclear reactors could directly power not only ships, but even locomotives, large construction equipment & ultimately semi tractors & large trucks. Would be more efficient than diesel/electric & far more effective & efficient than batteries!
Reality. This is from the Des Moines Register an concerning the only Small Modular Reactor (SMR) project in the U.S. today. It should be noted that NuScale said this month (Jan/2023) the target price for power from the plant is $89 per megawatt hour, up 53% from the previous estimate of $58 per MW hour In 2013, the Wall Street firm Lazard estimated that the cost of generating electricity at a new nuclear plant in the United States will be between $86 and $122 per megawatt-hour. Last November, Lazard estimated that the corresponding cost will be between $131 and $204 per megawatt-hour based upon the 4 recent new nuclear projects in the U.S. . During the same eight years, renewables have plummeted in cost, and the 2021 estimates of electricity from newly constructed utility-scale solar and wind plants range between $26 and $50 per megawatt-hour. Nuclear power is simply not economically competitive. SMRs will be even less competitive. Building and operating SMRs will cost more than large reactors for each unit (megawatt) of generation capacity. A reactor that generates five times as much power will not require five times as much concrete or five times as many workers. This makes electricity from small reactors more expensive; many of the original small reactors built in the United States were financially uncompetitive and shut down early. The estimated cost of constructing a plant with 600 megawatts of electricity from NuScale SMRs, arguably the design closest to deployment in the United States, was originally advertised as costing $1 billion but upon requesting actual bids from engineering firms, increased to $6.1 billion in 2020. Given inflation and other cost constraints that cost today can only be expected to be significantly higher. The cost was so high that ten members of Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems canceled their contracts. NuScale then changed its proposed plant configuration to 6 fewer reactors but increased each reactor output from 50 Mw to 77 Mw costing at total of $5.3 billion. The NRC just last week approved the construction of the 50 Mw design but now will have to start the review process all over given the switch to a 77 Mw design. For each kilowatt of electrical generation capacity, that estimate is around 80% more than the per-kilowatt cost of the Vogtle project in Georgia - before its cost exploded from $14 billion to over $30 billion. Based on the historical experience with nuclear reactor construction, SMRs are very likely to cost much more than initially expected. And they now have delayed the project start until 2025 in an attempt to find more backers. All this before the inevitable setbacks that will occur once construction starts.
Isn't fusion nuclear energy? Doesn't fusion have vast difficulties to overcome which will take 25 years to work out? Don't all worthwhile endeavors of mankind have great difficulties to overcome? We only have one working fusion power reactor and it doesn't work at night.
@@daniellarson3068 it's a different kind of nuclear it doesn't create nuclear waste or have the potential for a major disaster. It has recently been proven to work on a small scale by the US researchers but will take a decade or more to scale up to size so yes we need a bridge fuel to get us there we have that in oil and natural gas with the infrastructure and technology already in place. I can't see a lot of R&D investment going into new types of standard nuclear reactors at this point
@@MikeSmith-cl4ix The thing is that it has been a joke that fusion is just 25 years away since the 1950s. I think that joke is still valid. It makes no sense to jettison the most viable solution to the global warming issue, nuclear fission, in the faith that nuclear fusion will be developed on a timetable. It also makes no sense to stick with fossil fuels until that day arrives. Let's get some of these generation IV small modular reactors built and they will tie us over however long it takes until fusion or geothermal energy can do the job.
@@daniellarson3068 yeah I felt the same way but did you see the announcement they made a couple of days ago they used around 190 lasers aimed at a small capsule of fuel and produced 1/3 more energy than was put into it. That proves it works now they just have to scale it up. I don't have a problem with people investing in nuclear fission reactors if they want to I just think they're going to have a hard time finding someone that wants to. Though we shouldn't abandon any type of energy in the unlikely event there's a problem scaling it up. It's a national security issue we would be fools to get rid of oil and gas or nuclear until we have something working 100% to replace it.
Hi i'm really happy you made a video comparing them. 👍 i'd really like it if you compared the ones from GeHitachi, nuscale, terrapower, rollsroyce and toshiba.
I think it was the 1980s there was a lot of talk about the French developing small modular reactor then there was radio silence about it. A couple of the selling points I remember were : they were relatively inexpensive compared to conventional nuke plants, they could be built almost anywhere, they were inherently stable and they didn't contain enough fissile material to cause a Chernobyl or be repurposed for weapons. I always wondered whatever became of that.
There's been an on-and-off again interest in SMRs (even if they weren't always called that). The difference this time around, I think, is that there are a lot of companies and governments pushing for new technologies. I'm not sure either what happened to the previous French attempts... Cheers!
It was all wishful thinking at best but probably promotional lies. The driving force behind the nuclear industry has always been WAR. Britain effectively gave all of its' advanced nuclear research to the Americans in 1940-1941 to aid the Manhattan Project and then, using a piece of spurious legislation the Americans refused to share the results with Britain even though the A-bomb would have taken at least another 2 to 3 years without that British knowledge and expertise and cost in the region of 2-3 million more American lives with Japanese suicide fighters contesting every square inch. The American military then proceeded to make a terrible mess in the Western USA contaminating 10s of thousands of square miles as well as evicting newly "liberated" islanders from their homes in the Western Pacific and then making a terrible mess there. Denied access to results of their own work, megalomaniacs in Britain duplicated all that the Americans were keeping to themselves and made a terrible mess in Australia and the Indian Ocean. The fireworks in the Pacific and Indian Oceans were a bit too bright to remain unnoticed by the Soviets who made a terrible mess in Central Asia with vast areas of modern day Kazakhstan dangerously contaminated. ...... The insufferably pompous General Charles de Gaulle believing that France was entitled to no less than the others put the French bomb programme on steroids when he became president of France in 1958. We, therefore, had the four founding members of the United Nations all developing the World's one and only weapon of truly MASS destruction and then magicking up a treaty and intimidating almost all other sates to sign it forbidding them from doing anything on the nuclear front without the big four's permission. This has not stopped the Satanic Theocracy in Palestine from building nuclear weapons at Dimona leading to the Egyptians threatening that they were going to have a go. China declared that threats from the big 4 were paper tigers and they would make bombs if they wanted ..... and then there is North Korea. ..... and India ...... and Pakistan. The first four were, of course, streets ahead. The Soviets didn't give two hoots about what anyone else thought but Britain, France and the USA have tried to cloak their military nuclear developments by developing nuclear power stations and thereby trapping the electricity consumer in those countries into half paying for the military programme. If you want to know the true cost of "modular" reactors, just delve into Duonreay on the North Coast of Scotland. There were 5 reactors in total, 3 belonging to the Royal Navy, then 2 others, supposedly civil. One was a small research reactor and the last of the five was the World's first operational civil "fast-breeder". This is the only one that had provided any electricity. Mile after mile of ugly pylons were erected, festooned in ugly transmission lines across wilderness. The thing proved to be totally unreliable and was closed down. Initial estimate to decommission the site was set at £2,000 million. This has now climbed to £9,000 million and is still climbing. £9,000 million is £300 on average for every household in the UK. We keep hearing about liquid sodium being used as the transfer medium on some of these new reactors. WELL ! They used sodium on the fast-breeder. The sodium ate through one inch thick stainless steel pipes time after time and was the major cause of the unreliability of the reactor. They have drained it down into something like barrels but they still have approximately 1,600 tons of highly radio-active and highly reactive liquid sodium which has to be decanted into new containers from time to time because it devours everything they have tried. There is heavy security at the site, armed military, armed police officers etc and this will have to be maintained for hundreds of years. THAT IS THE COST OF SMALL MODULAR REACTORS. Every one a ticking Chernobyl or Fukushima. Those promoting the nuclear industry are naughty boys playing wjth matches behind the bicycle sheds. They will tell any lie. Every now and again they are careless. Not only do they burn down the whole school but a huge area around it as well.
@@MichaelClark-uw7ex The military ambition has always been WAR, not fear of it. In 1945, the Americans only got to drop 2 bombs and were very disappointed. Why did they pick Hiroshima and Nagasaki ? It is easy to explain Hiroshima, it was the main base of Mitsubishi but Nagasaki, the original foothold and, in 1945, the greatest concentration of Christians in Japan ? NO ! These two places were a long, long way from anywhere. It would take a long time, it was hoped before the warmongers in Tokyo would understand. This would give the Americans the opportunity to carry out at least one and possibly TWO more nuclear experiments before in dawned on those in Tokyo that the game was up.. The Americans nuclear cabal were horrified when the Emperor made his announcement on the radio. There were those who argued that the Japanese be allowed to send a delegation to America to see a bomb test but the hawks wanted to see real life experiments. The alternative was to send a message to Japan that the Japanese leadership may profit from looking to the East wearing dark glasses for the next hour and then Paul Tibbetts and his crew could have off-loaded their bomb about 50 miles out to sea. There was no reason to tell the Japs what to expect so that if it had failed, the Japs would have been mystified as the bomb would have suck down into some of the deepest sea in the World, but if it had worked as it did over Hiroshima, the Japanese leadership would have seen the effect and understood immediately. and the death toll might have been a few thousand who had the misfortune to be out on the sea in the target area but that is many times fewer than the 75,000 people who died immediately at Hiroshima, over 7,000 of them innocents under the age of 5. Many more died in the aftermath. That death toll was repeated at Nagasaki. Nuclear weapons have not stopped war. Every day of every month of every year since the dropping of the Hiroshima bomb, the World has been at war. Among many others, allow me to highlight a few of those that have hit the headlines, Korea, The Malay emergency, The French in Indochina, Tibet, The Suez Canal débâcle The appalling war of aggression by the Americans against the people of Vietnam, Katanga, The invasion of the Falklands by the Argentinian Junta, Angola, Various wars in South and Central American, almost all of which have been funded by New York business interests. Continuous war in Afghanistan since 1979, Yemen, Repeated wars of aggression upon the native people of Palestine and surrounding countries by the Satanic Theocracy, on and on and on .......................... and now UKRAINE ! The AtomicBlender, in this and other of his videos gives some disadvantages of nuclear power in order to appear dispassionate, when at heart, he is a nuclear megalomaniac. An awful lot of people are taken in by this very slick and well funded Göbbelism. "If you tell a lie often enough, people will believe it." My reply was to a contributor who asked a very good question. What DID happen to all those French lies ? I pointed out the facts about waste. The cost of dealing with waste makes any further development of nuclear power to be lunacy. Many small reactors dotted around the countryside simply multiplies the security cost necessary to stop terrorists from getting access to the any one of these multitude of sites FOR HUNDREDS OF YEARS. On 30 January 1933, the occasion of Hitler's appointment as Chancellor by President Hindenburg, Erich Ludendorff allegedly sent a telegram to Hindenburg (in German, you understand). The oft quoted part is : "I solemnly prophesy that this accursed man will cast our Reich into the abyss and bring our nation to inconceivable misery." Far more menacing and significant is what followed, "Future generations will damn you in your grave for what you have done" So it is. Future generations will damn the nuclear megalomaniacs AND WILL DAMN US FOR NOT STOPPING THEM !!!
@@terryhoath1983 You're view on history is highly skewed. Humans have been at war since there have been humans, it isn't something new that only appeared after the invention of the nuclear bomb.
Well done presentation explaining why we aren't seeing SMRs popping up all over the place. Seems to just a matter of time till the bugs are worked out and the cost and efficiency is in line with other energy production. Wind and solar just ain't going to cut it. Not alone anyway. They will have a place. All forms of energy production must be considered. For the time being, fossil fuels will be needed for some time yet. I have some doubt net zero can be achieved by 2050. Nor am I convinced it's even necessary.
As a nuclear engineer who works for Westinghouse, I think you did a GREAT job with the comparisons between large, small, and renewables. I’d love to see a video on a comparison between nuscale, terrapower, and (possibly) rolls Royce’s designs and their applicability for the future
Thanks for the feedback! I'd like to do exactly that and make some more detailed comparisons. Cheers!
@@atomicblender One more idea for a video if you don’t mind.
I think it would be really interesting to see how the “best” SMR design (perhaps not best but nuscale would probably provide best comparison since furthest along - I’ll leave that up to you lol) compares to the recent large asian designs (think APR-1400 or CAP-1000/Hualong One) in terms of which future customers would actually choose based on risk.
I think there’s currently a pull for SMRs in the west but less so in the Asian markets where they’ve been very successful in staying within budget and on time. As they start to export this technology and expertise outside of their respective countries/markets (e.g. barakah), how are customers, particularly in the west, going to make this hard choice in the early days - AKA the coming years - between unproven tech vs proven. The whole crux of SMRs is you gotta sell a lot and this may end up being a huge barrier to entry for the SMR suppliers if this Q can’t be answered (how to convince customers to go with them over Asian designs)
@@MrLando1996 he mentioned in the current video the potential for a wider market for SMRs in countries like Estonia: Small countries, geographically isolated countries (sparse interconnections to wider area grids for frequency stability), countries looking to replace their aging coal- or shale-fired plants of similar thermal powrr with reduced wider infrastructure changes. We couldn't use a megawatt reactor: changing its power output is not rapid enough.
Why are advantages of any new reactor design relevant, until the NRC is reformed? They’ve never yet approved a US reactor start to finish.
Nuclear energy is the MOST EXPENSIVE, the MOST DANGEROUS, the BIGGEST RISK from terrorism and the MOST CENTRALIZED and billionaire-owned form.
Solar panels on every rooftop empowers everyone as their own power generation owners. There’s no comparison!
End the radiation spewing into our oceans from Fukushima before supporting more nuclear power.
Being currently in the SMR industry, I think your assessment is accurate. To me the big thing is the financial risk for the owner is less because of the smaller size. The large plants with cost overruns nearly bankrupts large companies.
Exactly, smaller size lowers the overall risk to investors. $100M vs $10B is a lot easier to manage.
It's funny you said cost overruns nearly bankrupt large companies. In an earlier draft of a video I did, I used almost that exact phrase (referring to the AP1000 projects in the US), but it ended up being cut. Anyway, cheers!
The SMR industry? Isn’t it bit strange to make that claim of an “SMR industry” when not a single commercial SMR is even started construction yet, not even a license?
@@Nill757 Nuscale is licensed
@@albennett418 No. NuScale SMR design is approved by nrc, after twenty years and a $billion. The Nuscale construction license has not even been submitted yet, as that means spending more, and the NRC could destroy the company with a rejection. A great many RE interests will lobby to stop it, and the NRC board is loaded w a couple anti nuclear lawyers who would are likely to help the RE interest.
@@atomicblenderI was incorrect.
@13:12 im really impressed that some SMR's have the ability to reuse the fuel. Therefore the waste is vastly reduced. This is a HUGE difference between SMR's & traditional nuclear power plants.
Thank you for this clear explanation on SMR's. It is a pity that we can't use the enormous experience built up by the US Navy because that is secret. The reactors used in a aircraft carrier produces enough electricity for 7000 man and the propulsion of the ship but enables also the production of fresh water and bio fuel from seawater. These systems are working for over 50 years now. The knowledge and experience is there.
Fair point. Fortunately (or unfortunately) the US set its policy to not mix the military and civil nuclear programs. Not all countries do this, but there are areas like you mentioned where that experience would be very useful. Cheers!
It was (reportedly) ex-Navy nuclear reactor operators who took their "wisdom" to the Three Mile Island to a core meltdown. A Molten Salt Reactor can operate in a desert, water at ~2200 psi is not a happy thing. In an ocean not a problem, but comparing a land based Mega Watt reactor to a ship installation is a stretch. There are dozens of Gen4 propositions underway and avoiding water, for cooling, heat transfer, and moderation is a common feature. Molten salt reactors at low pressure avoids most of the fears of nuclear power. Nothing to explode.
But civilian reactors are based on military designs. Westinghouse, GE, Combustion Engineering and other vendors designed the military reactors systems and the companies scaled them for use in civilian applications.
The major difference between them is the use of exotic materials that civilians can’t afford that the military uses.
Civilian reactors use fuel that is enriched 4 to 5% U235, military reactors are enriched to weapons grade uranium. Low enrichment allows civilian reactors to use less expensive boron control rods, military reactors have to use more exotic materials due to the high enrichment levels.
Civilian reactors run at 100% power for about 2 years, military reactors typically run at much lower levels. When I was a Navy RO on Sunday, we typically ran at 15 to 20% power all patrol because running at flank bells creates a lot of noise.
In the 70’s a sub was refueled every decade or so, but if run at 100% power as civilian reactors do, they would have to be refueled every 2 years or so.
@@LSuschena Thank you for the explanation.
@@LSuschena 100% for 2 years or 20% for 10 years looks the same to me. It is not the fuel burn-up that causes the solid fuel to become unusable, but the trapped breakdown products that acts as neutron absorbers, and that is why the rods have to be re-shuffled and/or replaced as the ones in the center get more activity. That is one reason a liquid fuel reactor is better, as Xenon gas, and others can be separated out. Alvin Weinberg who designed the navy reactor also designed the MSR as he thought the light water reactor was unsuitable for commercial land use. He also designed the MSR for a Thorium breeding cycle, which incidentally has less problematic waste disposal profile.
SMR's can conquer the biggest problem with nuclear reactors, the immense cost of to build and license them. Bankruptcy is a real problem for nuclear construction, as is unwarranted fear of them. Naval reactors don't scale well for the above reasons.
The answer is MSR.
Solid fuel is a mechanical device, liquid fuel is more like a chemical device, which opens a lot of possibilities for cleaning the fuel, an simpler on-line addition of new fuel.
Getting rid of intermittent power generation will remove unrecyclable solar panels, as well as removing wildlife killing machines (wind farms). Sounds fantastic to me.
Let’s be real about one thing in the west we built reactors in the 1960s in the 70s in the 80s. This is the same in Europe and then we stopped for 25 to 30 years. Now we’re trying to reboot these industries. The real impediment started around the time of the creation of the nuclear regulatory commission in the mid-1970s, at least in the United States case we did not pick a few designs, but we had many independent vendors building custom machines. Canada built multiple machine complexes at a few sites, concentrating and sharing facilities and personnel. This needs to happen in the United States and other countries we also depend on very large Forgings and pressure vessels for our light water, reactors SMR’s could provide some modularity to the construction of multi reactor complexes. But maybe new designs are needed. Overall, the Canadians have an excellent record with their CanDu reactors that require no enriched Uranium.
Agreed, the US went so long without building that all the experience was lost. Supporting industries like heavy forgings are overseas now, although that's not the end of the world. Canada is a great example, they have a lot of nuclear co-generating with hydro very nicely. Low-enriched uranium is also nice, but a downside is a bit more waste compared to enriched fuel.
@@atomicblender True, there are some new designs in the pipeline that are designed to consume, spend fuel and depleted uranium as fuel or a feedstock for fission product lines.
The US ceased building new reactors 'back then' because the costs were too high and were increasing. The costs are still too high, Look at what Vogtle 3&4 will have to charge for their electricity, And that's after the utility raised rates about six times in order to take money from customers to use for reactor construction.
At some point nuclear advocates need to face reality, People will not willingly accept large increases in electricity prices just so some company can build a reactor.
Here is what is likely to happen in Georgia.
The new Vogtle reactors will come online. Rates will take a significant jump up. In the meantime we have become much more efficient in our use of electricity (LEDs, better refers, etc.) meaning that demand has not risen as was expected when work began on new nuclear. And the cost of solar has greatly decreased.
Because GA will prioritize keeping nuclear going they will most likely shut down cheaper fossil fuel plants, putting more upward pressure on rates. As rates go up more and more consumers will install solar and storage for their homes and businesses. That will further lower demand, leaving GA with the need to cut generation. And unless they face reality and close one or both of the new reactors they will, again, have to increase rates.
Wind and Solar is heavily subsidized by the government. It also requires a back system for when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine. So add all those small natural gas fired plants to the cost of renewables.
Great rundown! Do LFTRs and pebble beds! Also, does cost take into account the size and length of transmission lines and their losses. Aren’t SMRs going to be much closer on average to where their power will be used, and therefore cheaper?
SMRs should, in theory, be able to be built closer or on previous sites (like coal or existing nuclear). This should be better than building super far away from where anyone lives.
An SMR could possibly fit inside/nearby to existing sub-stations using the existing wiring and transformers. Shorter, local-grid/buried wiring could minimize EMP danger.
Building reactor sites with room for numerous SMRs could fill the site with various experimental reactors to evaluate and provide excess capacity to allow taking problem reactors offline and perhaps fixing/modifying/improving them with robots.
Military bases could be a good place to site these facilities.
Fluoride can indeed be used as a solvent for uranium, including the separation of U233 from molten salts in a molten salt reactor. However, the feasibility of this approach depends on several factors.
One factor to consider is the chemical properties of fluoride. Fluoride ions are highly reactive, and they can react with many substances, including metals. This reactivity can be an advantage in separating uranium from other metals in the molten salt, but it can also lead to corrosion of the reactor materials, which is a significant challenge in designing and operating a molten salt reactor.
Another factor to consider is the radioactivity of the materials involved. Separating U233 from molten salts is a complex process that involves handling highly radioactive materials, which requires significant safety measures and specialized equipment. The use of fluoride as a solvent can also produce radioactive waste, which must be carefully managed and disposed of.
Despite these challenges, fluoride-based methods have been studied and developed for separating U233 from molten salts in molten salt reactors. Research has shown that fluoride-based methods can be effective in separating U233, but further development and testing are needed to determine their practicality and feasibility in large-scale commercial applications.
Great overview. I'm an advisor to a Texas state representative. We're trying to get Texas energy policy to move toward SMRs.
Glad to hear you found this useful! Policymakers have a lot of influence on how these things go
A state with excellent wind and solar resources. How do you pitch the deal of paying more than necessary for electricity?
You've got no actual cost for SMR electricity. NuScale now states $0.08 to $0.10/kWh if they can get financing to build their design. That sort of price isn't competitive in Texas.
You did not bring up medial isotope application of thorium MSRs. The sales of this material can lower the operational costs.
Thank you! Great to gain insight into a complex scenario without the need for an Engineering degree! I'm looking forward to learning more from your diligent information gathering and presenttion. Nice!
This is a great introductory video. Something that the video doesn't bring out so clearly is that for a lot of these questions the answer is really: it depends. SMR is a business model not a reactor design and different SMR designs can actually be very different. As just one example: water cooled designs like NuScale actually don't work well with intermittent renewables. This is because of economics: yes NuScale can scale the output, but only by throttling the reactor. However, a nuclear reactor costs essentially the same whether you run it at 100% or 10%. Meaning when NuScale throttles output by 50% they are halving their income but their costs are exactly the same: greatly hampering the plant economics. The same is not true of high-temperature reactors, such as TerraPower's Natrium or Molten Salt Reactor designs because the high temperatures allow the use of thermal energy storage: they can run the reactor at 100% all the time and store the excess energy for later. These designs are a perfect compliment for intermittent renewables and they do not compete with each other economically in the same way. Indeed for a lot of these questions the answer actually comes to do "It depends on the specifics of the design": you could take each of the questions you've asked and get completely different answers for different SMR designs.
Personally I'm not especially optimistic for water-cooled SMR designs like NuScale, although I'm happy to be proven wrong. However, I think high-temperature designs such as Natrium, Moltex, ThorCon, Kairos, etc. have a lot more potential advantages. Overall it'll be interesting to see how this space develops over the next few years.
They are such a great way to go. You can install them where you have a localized high demand. Like a large factory, for an entire university, disaster areas, and so forth.
Don't overlook the NIMBY issue. Safe or not there is massive resistance to living close to a nuclear reactor.
You left out the huge cost of energy storage needed for solar and wind. That will change the numbers substantially.
It's hard to get decent numbers on energy storage since not many places are doing it. But I agree, that will shift those up if it's included. Cheers!
I really really hope this Flourishes. I greatly appreciate your video. I hope people get on board with this new era of advanced nuclear energy options.
Thanks for the positive feedback! Me too
Excellent well balanced video. When talking about renewables and stating their low cost, we should perhaps also add in the extra cost of a backup solution which is needed to be available so when the wind doesn't blow / sun doesn't shine etc.. i.e. Solar plus batteries / wind plus hydrogen storage etc.
Good call! Often that gets forgotten (I've done it too...)
Wind and Solar is heavily subsidized by the government.
It helps that many places have stopped accepting large renewable applications without storage...
What happens to the LCOE for wind and solar when you add the cost of storage? Include the cost of extended periods bad weather.
Good point, I did see some statistics on adding storage but then the sources became more varied and it was more difficult to do a comparison. I think that's something to revisit. Cheers!
Great video! Could you please do a piece on MSRs from ThorCon or Moltex (the latter should play well with renewables). These guys are on track to solve some of the waste problems.
MSG? uncle roger? hayaaaa!
More and more online videos will save da planet guys.
Yes, ThorCon and Moltex both have designs that should be ready to produce energy this decade.
Waste is no practical problem. Regulations, on the other hand, are a very practical problem.
@@dominikvonlavante6113 Safety and waste (safe waste ..?) are the same problem,
how do you know future g e n e r a t i o n s will have the means to handle it ...
(uneasy handling of Tritium : 9621 Curies/gr). What about monitoring, sampling,
analyzing food from certain localities ...
Please tell us more about Terrestrial Energy. They seem to be in the best position to get small modular molten salt reactors online the fastest.
Where are they at with that?
Terrapower was supposed to build their MSR 2 years ago but ran into a problem because their fuel was Russian sourced. Even though they received $2 billion in taxpayer matching funds, Billionaire Bill Gates just got the taxpayer to fork over another 125 million to make the fuel here in the U.S.
The real problem is that the estimate for his 345 Mw reactor is $4 billion even before it is built. And to be anywhere cost effective with other power producing methods nuclear MUST be less than $6 billion for a 1,000 Mw unit. Of course they say it will become cheaper in the future but has that ever happened?
It makes no sense for any nuclear power plant, large or small, to "fill in" for "renewables" when the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing. "Renewables" might make sense when they replace power from plants that use combustion as a source of energy, but it's utterly irrational to use them to displace power from a nuclear plant.
Breeder reactor features include the ability to use "spent" fuel rods and use 90% of the remaining original uranium as well as changing isotopes in the waste to less radioactive elements with much shorter half lives.
Name one that does that. Just because you heard it on a YT video does not make it true
A lot of the cost comparisons leave out what invested money could have done to create more money since it took decades to build. I’ve read multiple times this is why a lot of places won’t do it. If it costs $60MWH but your money was tied up for 10-20 years then the reality is that you could have used that money to make money. Which is why it makes more sense to build something that only takes a few years. So that’s a huge advantage to these SMRs if these actually work out.
True. Capital carrying costs *should* be captured in the LCOE or Overnight, but not always. In either case, ROI will decline for loooong delayed projects. Hopefully SMRs address that shortcoming. Cheers!
Levelized cost for wind or solar assumes 100% output - The wind doesn't always blow and sometimes it cloudy.
More specifically I'd like to see wind and solar with energy storage costs attached. I think then you could get a good baseline against coal, has, and nuclear.
While the RR SMR is not technically an SMR due to its size at 470MW it has been designed to the maximum diameter of the reactor for road transportation under bridges etc. clearly RR saw that size does matter in terms of economics, something others are learning the hard way. They are adopting the modular manufacturing etc.
A video reviewing the RR approach wrt SMR vs mid vs large would be interesting.
It would be good to also include a chapter on Sheffield Forge Masters new welding tech designed specifically to reduce the fabrication time while increasing quality of nuclear reactor vessels.
Great channel. I have worked on the JET project and for nuclear operators and I am still learning and your channel is very insightful and well researched and presented. Good effort. Carry on.
I'd agree, when I first saw the RR SMR, I said, "That's neither small nor modular. But it is a reactor." It has some modularity like you said and I didn't realize they had designed largest components to be transportable on normal roads. That helps a lot in siting and construction expense since it should reduce lead times and delays.
I saw the Sheffield new welding approach, but I haven't had a chance to look into it more. If it's as good as they claim, that's huge and I don't know why there wasn't more press.
A video on the economics of S vs M vs L would be super interesting (at least to me!). I'll keep that idea on my list. Cheers!
Now if LFTR's can get past the development stage so to extract the rest of the energy with the SMR waste streams.
I'm just discovering your channel, and I love the Thorium and LSR explorations you did.
I would love a deep dive into deep geothermal, as it seem to be the best of all worlds.
Simple to google problems with geothermal.
A lot of technical factors seem important for SMRs but they’re secondary issues. By far the largest issue w any kind of new nuclear tech in the US (or Europe) is the regulator, the US NRC. The NRC is malevolent, has not approved a single US reactor from start to finish so far. Every single operational US reactor saw its first proposal under the former AEC.
Until the NRC is reformed, all the new appealing features of SMR like safety, and apparent cost savings … don’t matter if the NRC delays approval, or worse, approves the plant and then afterwards demands changes (as it did w Vogtle), or, demands some ridiculously large staff per every small reactor unit.
For some reason most in the industry are reluctant to call out the NRC on its obstructions, nor do media commentators point out the central problem which is the NRC. The NRC just rejected the ultra small design of Oklo, and rejected the extension license of a long existing plant in Florida, which the NRC had *already* approved.
Until this problem is confronted, even well informed and prudent pro/common videos are a waste of time.
Having a well diversafied power infrastructure is akin to having a well diversified portfolio, you hedge risks and maintain flexability.
Would you add a stock to your portfolio that is for a company that sells a product that no one can afford. Because that is new nuclear.
@@clarkkent9080 If No can afford, how would I be able to? Your hypothetical remark has gaping hole.
@@memback My point is simple; new nuclear, at least in the U.S. , is 2 to 3 times the cost of other power production methods. So why diversify power methods with one that is much more expensive than all the others. Simple fact in the U.S. NO NEW NUCLEAR POWER plants are planned while hundreds of solar and wind farms are actually being built in 2023.
How about evaluating the Moltex design. First of a kind to be built at the end of this decade by New Brunswick Power?
A bit different question: where did you get the lightning world map in the background?
A really good basic explanation of SMRs and their comparison to other means of electricity generation. However there are a number of factors that should be taken into account when comparing costs. Firstly the time value of money which means electricity in terms of levelised costs is higher for nuclear stations that take 20 years to build rather than 7 years. Secondly the cost of offshore wind should take into account both capital costs and transmission losses of having to connect for example offshore wind in remote locations to the grid. This compares to SMRs which can be built at existing connections to the grid at the sites of old coal and nuclear stations closer to population centres. And thirdly the levelised costs of renewables with intermittency e.g. sun and wind, need to include the backup generation capital and running costs e.g. using open cycle gas turbines for backup. In other words the costs of generating electricity when the wind doesn't blow and the sun does not shine.
Usually LCOE and Overnight Capital take into account interest charges and such. Higher or lower discount rates could be applied and ROI would decline if a project takes longer than expected. That's one of the things SMRs should address, at least somewhat, is the looooong build times of big plants. Cheers!
Seeing how the X-Energy XE-100 SMR works, it's pretty interesting. With Dow buying them for electricity and steam output, these SMRs can be used for much more than just powering the grid.
Reality (sort-of since none have been even built yet in the U.S.)
This is from the Des Moines Register an concerning the only Small Modular Reactor (SMR) project in the U.S. today. It should be noted that NuScale said this month (Jan/2023) the target price for power from the plant is $89 per megawatt hour, up 53% from the previous estimate of $58 per MW hour
In 2013, the Wall Street firm Lazard estimated that the cost of generating electricity at a new nuclear plant in the United States will be between $86 and $122 per megawatt-hour. Last November, Lazard estimated that the corresponding cost will be between $131 and $204 per megawatt-hour based upon the 4 recent new nuclear projects in the U.S. . During the same eight years, renewables have plummeted in cost, and the 2021 estimates of electricity from newly constructed utility-scale solar and wind plants range between $26 and $50 per megawatt-hour. Nuclear power is simply not economically competitive.
SMRs will be even less competitive. Building and operating SMRs will cost more than large reactors for each unit (megawatt) of generation capacity. A reactor that generates five times as much power will not require five times as much concrete or five times as many workers. This makes electricity from small reactors more expensive; many of the original small reactors built in the United States were financially uncompetitive and shut down early.
The estimated cost of constructing a plant with 600 megawatts of electricity from NuScale SMRs, arguably the design closest to deployment in the United States, was originally advertised as costing $1 billion but upon requesting actual bids from engineering firms, increased to $6.1 billion in 2020. Given inflation and other cost constraints that cost today can only be expected to be significantly higher.
The cost was so high that ten members of Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems canceled their contracts. NuScale then changed its proposed plant configuration to 6 fewer reactors but increased each reactor output from 50 Mw to 77 Mw costing at total of $5.3 billion. The NRC just last week approved the construction of the 50 Mw design but now will have to start the review process all over given the switch to a 77 Mw design. For each kilowatt of electrical generation capacity, that estimate is around 80% more than the per-kilowatt cost of the Vogtle project in Georgia - before its cost exploded from $14 billion to over $30 billion. Based on the historical experience with nuclear reactor construction, SMRs are very likely to cost much more than initially expected. And they now have delayed the project start until 2025 in an attempt to find more backers. All this before the inevitable setbacks that will occur once construction starts.
Cool channel, keep it up. Very interesting so far!
Point Lepreau CANDU reactors in NB are installing one SMR as a field pilot project with the intent to reuse some of the on site stored spent fuel which still has 90% useful energy that could not be extracted with the earlier Gen CANDU reactor. The engineering of the reactor was done a long time ago.
Distributed generation has become a beneficial concept in industry. SMRs will make this available on the utilities electric distribution level. Increased resilience, less dependence on vulnerable grids, etc., etc.
The use of "renewables" in poorer nations has been costly, unreliable, and conflict-producing enterprises. In particular the use of hydro dams. Conflicts have arisen between China and, India, China and Vietnam, Egypt and Ethiopia, Turkey and Syria, and a myriad of other areas. Find a dam on a river crossing multiple nations and there is a potential conflict. The use of SMRs seems to be a reasonable solution. The safeguards of low-grade waste and storage of material can be safeguards put in place. These safeguards seem a better option than the guaranteed conflict caused by the use of very expensive hydroelectric dams.
You talked about the possibility to install does SMRs in cities or close to big consumers, also in a combination for renewables. But how fast can they react? Can you start them up and shut them down in a short time?
The other part I was missing is how secured is the fuel, when the world starts using much more nuclear power how long does the uranium last?
All nuclear power plants are base load plants. Either 0% power or 100% power.
Nuclear power plants need large cooling water bodies and emergency plans to evacuate people in an emergency. That is why some nuclear plants near large populations were shutdown because they could not evacuate large numbers of people
There is a demonstration project being built in tennessee. I don't remember who the Builder is. That would make a good video going into that particular one
I believe TVA is trying to license the GE Hitachi BWRX-300. The same one has started construction in Ontario and I believe they are trying for a license in the UK
I'd be interested to know what your background is in nuclear fission. Interesting video and thanks for posting.
Great but not going anywhere till the regulations are changed.
One thing not mentioned about cost is the electric waste and cost of transporting electricity. With SMR's those costs are way down as they can be way closer to the demand of the electricity. Factories that use a ton of power could install one and have very reliable power.
Regulations, at least in the US, are directed too much towards light water reactors and NRC has struggled to adapt to anything else. Momentum is a powerful thing.
Standardization is a first step to cost reduction. You need a standard size, shape and interface. You also need standardized teats for safety and function. Then multiple suppliers can compete on fair terms.
Every reactor that the U.S. currently operates is a standard design, be it Westinghouse, CE, or B&W.
The NRC has to approve a reactor design so it is not like they are all different.
5:32 passive cooling makes sense for smaller and smaller reactors because smaller things can't stay warm like large things. I can only guess that a reactor for a single home will not need any cooling at all.
Excellent presentation! Informative and concise.
I think molten salt designs need more exposure. Especially those using Thorium as a fuel.
The USA tried that back in the late 60's. If you read the final report, they listed many total roadblocks-- even at just 10% of the neutron flux needed, many components broke down. Lots of major stopping-points.
@@georgegonzalez2476 that's not what I heard about the Oakridge unit. It ran for many months; yes lots of blocks, but none that are insurmountable. needs funding, good research. It will be with us well before 2030
@@mrstevecox7 Go read the actual final report.
www.osti.gov/biblio/4372873
used the most exotic alloys they could find, and the thing irretrievably broke down in just a very few months at around 10% of the economical flux level. Many other issues that they had no solution for then or now. Servicing the valves and heat-exchangers was impossible due to the deadly remnant radiation levels. The one similar reactor that they French tried, it needed FOUR ACRES of reprocessing buildings, running continuously, to filter out the worst of the fission products. In a production reactor you would need those buildings at least duplicated so there would always have a chance of having one running reprocessing facility at all times. A huge no-go technically, operationally, and economically.
Very informative! SMRs are the future. Nuclear fusion is also promising and might be the key to complementing intermittent renewables without depending on fossil fuels and large storage.
Hey you did a great job on the explanation.
Request you to give more insights on passive system of smr?
Thanks for the chapters :-)
This is really quality content. Thank you so much for the videos❤️
I'm betting on India or Israel being the first to step in with both feet. Both have access to all technology needed, and the strong motivation to create a new paradigm for energy independence for their people.
I'm pretty sure the molten salt designs will win out, and we might even see sealed systems small enough to transport the modular assembly within a few sealed shipping containers. One benefit that wasn't discussed here, but which REALLY needs to be addressed is the concept of distribution power generation. Rolling blackouts are an inevitability of large central generating. More, smaller generators are necessary to stabilize the growing power needs. SMRs are one of the few options that meets the high energy density and stable production requirements here.
WEC is looking to deploy the eVinci reactor. Have you collected anything interesting on it?
I would like a deep dive on why the nuclear regulatory commission can’t seem to allow reactors to be built on time/on budget. I think it needs to be abolished and replaced with something more like the atomic energy commission. Why is nuscale behind schedule on its demonstration reactor?
@Xxx Yyy Because their first test ended up leaving the moderator in the condenser causing the failsafe.....to fail miserably.
The NRC only requires utilities to build nuclear power plants according to design. The AEC has NOT existed for 50 years.
Here is the bad NRC actually expecting Vogtle nuclear plant to x-ray critical welds and actually test safety system...how dare they !!!
Below is the Vogtle Project Management's answer for the latest delays:
Southern Co. yesterday announced another delay for its long-troubled nuclear construction project in Georgia, edging its costs closer to the $30 billion mark.
The setback could now push the startup date for Plant Vogtle’s first reactor until early 2023 and move the date for the second one to later that year.
Plant Vogtle’s latest move highlights the nuclear industry’s chief troubles with building large, baseload reactors: safety and cost. To be clear, Southern executives have blamed this new hiccup on paperwork, saying that workers were gathering it to send to federal safety regulators and noticed critical inspection records were missing or incomplete. The pile of missing or incomplete documents added up to a delay of three to six months, Southern said. That additional time is costing $920 million.
“We’re a little frustrated with the latest developments,” Southern Co. CEO Tom
Fanning talked of “great momentum” at the construction site since November.
But workers realized “tens of thousands” of critical documents were missing, leading to a three-month backlog.
“We’re fixing that part of the ‘paper’ process,” he told E&E News.
@@clarkkent9080 You are a Nuclear industry worker and you have a bias for the use of nuclear reactors that's on full display here. You told on yourself as being an operator of 3 different PWRs of which released massive amounts of various effluents into the biota. Why didn't you then act on that knowledge and shut your reactors down being that those effluents, especially Organically Bound Tritium from the tritium releases, caused so many peoples cancer while you cash your salary check? It doesn't matter which design, fuel or coolants you wish was being used because they simply aren't and now globally nuclear accounts for single digits of our energy production and beginning to fall even further with much less subsidies going to the nuclear industry than before. What is the difference in half-life of tritium at 12-30 days versus Organically Bound Tritium?
What do you know about the progress of micro reactors? Having a reactor design that is road-transportable and can fit within a single sea can would be incredibly useful for industry.
great summary .... not sure if you included cost of transmission/distribution which is a massive cost for most implementations.... with existing distribution systems and transmission systems, would SMR's not be more cost efficient in deploying additional capacity closer to loads,.... whereas large Nuclear and Green will need massive investments in new Transmission.
Thanks, I would like to know more about the electrical distribution system of the SMR, how is the Class level distributed?
6:36 a BIG item in your explanation of LCOE which you left out is the "discount rate". This is roughly speaking the return on investment expected over time aka the interest rate of the capital investment. Nuclear is a bigger investment, so if there is a larger discount and rate the costs are artificially high because of that. As well, LCOE usually does not address nuclear's benefits after 40 years. You can see these start to appear in some LCOE reports as "fully depreciated nuclear".
With municipal projects that "return on investment" should be much lower. After all you wouldn't buy a bridge with a credit card and government bonds dot not pay out like the stock market.
Vogtle units 3/4 have a principal loan of $31-32 billion with ~$1 billion per year interest. Southern company just asked for a 600 million dollar rate increase for unit 3 and I assume they will ask for the same for unit 4. Electric rates will at least double. Reliable power at a cost few can afford.
Please explain why old fully paid for nuclear plants are shutting down every year when investor owned utilities say they are not cost effective??
@@clarkkent9080 1. high labor costs, 2. low fracked gas prices in the US, 3. construction delays / bad supply chain / bad subcontractors (just like happens in EVERY municipal project), 4. regulatory delays (thanks to Jaczko the grifter)
@@soyattle Simple point: Hundreds of solar farms, wind farms, gas turbines are being built in the U.S. every year, no problems there. No U.S. utility is even considering new nuclear that takes 16 years to complete. Doesn't matter the reason, those are the facts.
PS Jaczko has been gone for 11 years. When are you going to stop using that excuse and replacing it with facts.
Fact #1 Trump completely canceled Yucca Mountain
Fact #2 Trump completely canceled the MOX project
Fact #3 Trump refused to support VC Summer and ut was canceled in 2017
Fact #4 Trump allowed the fraud and waste to continue at Vogtle now 110% over budget and schedule.
@@clarkkent9080 Trump is an idiot and its clear from your reaction that you think this is a partisan issue. It should not be one.
@@soyattle I don't know if there is one word to correctly describe trump but your word is close. You brought up Jaczko from 11 years ago and that is usually a partisan republican trying to blame Democrats' for all nuclear's problems. In response, I only point out that republicans are not without sin.
I worked on the MOX facility some and I give trump credit. That project was a money pit that was never going to run and trump was the only one who could shut Linsey Graham down. Linsey is personally responsible for the project failure.
I saw 2 points you brought up that are caused by fear mongering instead of actual fact.
1. The waste nuclear reactors produce is actually really small
Fuel rods are 4% fissionable material, each rod usually last 5 years and after they're finished about 4 % of the fuel rod actually becomes waste. The actual global weight of waste each year is about 10.000 metric tons which may seem like alot but that's about 500 m3 per year which means you could fit 100s of years worth of nuclear waste in a couple of warehouses.
2. Proliferation
Like I mentioned nuclear fuel is about 4% fissionable material
For any explosive weapons you need upwards of 90%
Which needs massive processing plants that costs billions
So that's also a fear mongering argument
"In any system of energy, Control is what consumes energy the most.
No energy store holds enough energy to extract an amount of energy equal to the total energy it stores.
No system of energy can deliver sum useful energy in excess of the total energy put into constructing it.
This universal truth applies to all systems.
Energy, like time, flows from past to future".
Another great job! Your analogy of the swimmer is absolutely spot on. LCOE is an oft overused and misused metric.
I could push back some on your score card based on individual MsR designs as I believe certain designs hold exceptional promise. But overall a balanced view.
I would however push back a bit more firmly on renewables tho. They have a place but I feel it is much smaller than generally believed. There is far too much hype in the renewables world. Farming energy is only slightly better than farming in general on EROI. We need an EROI that’s much higher than they offer to sustain society! The breathing room in excess energy out offered by fossil fuels that powers our world is just not going to be replaced by renewables. For more I recommend Vaclav Smil’s book “How the World really works”. Another good critique of renewables is Meredith Angwin’s “Shorting the Grid”. It’s time to stop “kissing the ring” of the Renewables propaganda machine and tell the truth. Nuclear needs to be the backbone of our energy system if we really want to decarbonize.
Thanks! I can't fully claim credit for the swimmer, I heard that somewhere else but I liked it as a way to keep in mind why we might pay more for certain things.
I see nuclear as the reliable baseload to renewables, at least in the near to medium term. More advanced nuclear designs, or even fusion, have more promise but will take time. I'll check out the books you mentioned. Cheers!
Great balanced presentation thank you. I appreciate this is a presentation comparing smr with large nuclear so these following comments are directed at expanding options to be looked at and compared with. Geothermal, hydro and perhaps tidal generators should be included as an option as well as the option of storage units such as battery or heat sink sand storage for heating to be coupled with intermittent sources like solar or wind. Again a very good explanation and well balanced. Perhaps a next video on a comparison of all the old and new non fossil fuel sources
Wind and solar are now, by far, the least expensive ways to generate electricity and their cost is expected to continue to decline. Lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries are dropping in cost rapidly and have extremely long cycle lifes which makes storage very affordable. This is what any nuclear solution has to work against.
And don't forget. Nuclear needs both storage and backup generation. Nuclear is not good at load following and if you reduce reactor output to match demand then the cost of electricity produced increases. Cost per MWh = total cost / total output. The nuclear plant needs to run at max output and use some sort of storage to park unneeded output for use during peak demand periods.
We built a lot of pump up hydro storage back in the days when we were building reactors in the US.
And reactors frequently go offline unscheduled. There has to be some sort of generation standing by to make up for the loss. Most likely that's going to be a CCNG plant. And the cost of those plants and their fuel has to be folded into the true cost of nuclear produced electricity.
Large scale nuclear reactors were only economical when the US government heavily subsidized the industry. When the US government began to slow down the production of nuclear weapons, the money dried up and TMI caused a lot of hysteria, killing the economy of scale as construction projects were all canceled.
Fukushima's meltdowns occurred because the staff was inadequately trained in how the emergency cooling system worked. There was a system designed to passively remove heat from the reactor even with a total loss of onsite power. BUT if you shut the system off and lose all power, the system cannot be reactivated. They shut the passive cooling system off, lost all power, and could not reactivate it. This is a piece of information you rarely hear in Western media but was admitted in a Japanese documentary by NHK years ago.
The Idaho National Laboratory actually developed a reactor called the Integral Fast Reactor in the 1980's that was designed from the outset to leverage physics to make it impossible to have a meltdown. They could shut the coolant feed pumps off with the emergency shutdown system disabled, which would result in a meltdown with a traditional reactor design. The Integral Fast Reactor's temperature would spike, reactivity would drop, and the system would slowly shut itself down naturally, no meltdown. They tested all the worst case scenarios involving loss of cooling and the reactor always went into a natural shutdown state once it couldn't reject heat. INL also developed the IFR Fuel Reprocessing Facility which demonstrated the concept of a closed fuel cycle. No more worrying about spent fuel casks piling up on site waiting for transport to a storage site. Instead the Fuel Reprocessing Facility would reprocess spent fuel on-site. It demonstrated that the plant could recycle the fuel on-site and continue to re-use it again and again for the life of the plant. It was canceled in 1994 after overwhelming pressure from know-nothing politicians like John Kerry. Many of these politicians demanded the IFR program be shut down because they were in the pocket of the coal and petroleum industry that were threatened by the idea of nuclear power plants that could generate massive amounts of power without risk of a meltdown and would be able to re-use the same fuel for the life of the plant.
The frustrating thing is that the cost of nuclear energy is often what gets brought up in criticisms of its use as a source of energy. The US government spent $100 billion dollars over the last 70 years on subsidies for nuclear power. The US government has already blown way past that on subsidies for wind and solar in a fraction of the time. The US government spent $55 billion on "green" energy projects in 2019 alone. If they had continued to invest in the IFR and continued development, we wouldn't be invading foreign countries on the other side of the planet today in order to take their rare earth metals for short-lived solar panel projects that are highly intermittent and equally toxic and damaging to the environment.
Low natural gas costs are quickly becoming a thing of the past. Low cost natural gas generation forced the closure of smaller nuke plants. Nukes will be back.
Is more of them, spread over a wider area actually safer? If they produce less energies then there is need to make and install more of them.
Wind and solar don't incude the massive energy storage costs that need to be included, and they don't include the cost of dunkerflaute and therefore the need for additional capacity. If your expected wind farm generates 1 GW of power, well really you need to generate 1.3 GW of power to account for capacity shortages over a long period of time like a big storm that covers the entire country or something.
10:00 This cost to build per kW chart includes wind generators as if they are independent generators which they are not. Wind generators have to have their power output conditioned to grid quality typically by NGCC plants and can not provide power grid capacity because they may not be operational at all times.
10:16 $11 MWh NG without carbon capture is $0.011 kWh or 1.1¢ kWh. That is considerably cheaper than the cost of NG fuel at $5 mmBTU.
$5 per mmBTU NG, 273 kWh = mmBTU, 50% efficiency NGCC power plant
(273 kWh/$5) X (1/273)/(1/273) = 1 kWh/$0.018. 100% efficiency
NGCC plant 50% efficiency 1 kWh/$0.018 X 1/2 = 1 kWh/$0.036 or 1 MWh/$36
With wholesale prices for NG in 2022-12-22 hovering a bit above $5 mmBTU in the USA a reasonable estimate for fueling a natural gas combined cycle plant is $36 per MWh which much higher than the levelized cost of $11 per MWh show in this chart.
Even when NG was for a brief time at $2 mmBTU this would of only put the fueling costs at 2/5 of $36 MWh or $14.4 MWh. This is just fuel cost of NG! No physical plant costs included.
NG is no longer cost competitive with coal as a fuel for generating electric power which it had been increasingly since 2008. The chart at 10:00 shows coal plants are 2 - 3 times more expensive to build per kW than NGCC plants. The estimates for coal plant cost per kWh appear low. 2005 estimates I've seen in reports placed new coal plants at around $4,000 kW with prices going up so fast contracts were not able to give a guaranteed cost estimate causing few contracts to be singed. New modern coal plants produce almost no environmentally harmful air emissions and are much more efficient than the bulk of older USA operating coal plants. A modern new coal generating plant could have fueling costs close to 1¢ kWh. The do need to be of large scale to spread their large crewing costs over a large plant. The mining of coal and handling of coal The big question is what is going to happen to the long term cost of natural gas in the USA.
I keep wondering what is happening to Kirk Sorensen, who was on the forefront of the revival of SMRs with his LFTR design about 20 years ago.
Flibe Energy seems to be alive, but I don't understand how is it possible that they still do not have a design ready for production and mostly: why are they not in the news??
Also: from what I understand, there is at least one working LFTR in India.
What's going on with with SMRs in India and China?
Maybe it is because Sorensen is a snake oil salesman and Bill Gates told him, NOT INTERESTED" when he tried to push Thorium in Terrapower's Natrium MSR
I checked their web site yesterday and very little information on their progress is published. It is understandable that they do not have a design ready. Their goal is too aggressive and too many problems to be conquered. Their initial proposal calls for online chemical re-processing. This online reprocessing thing may take them decades to fulfill.
A lot of momentum and serious money behind this sector....I can tell you that a lot of engineers in the sector are hoping it's promises materialise. We have to try! And then there is their application in space/ Mars exploration.
after NRC is done with it, it won't be small or cheap.
There's a lot of nuance that cant fit in a convenient run time.
the overnight cost thing tends to be a bit fuzzy. a properly designed large-scale reactor could potentially run for a 100 years. but you might have to pay that overnight cost 3-5x in the same period for wind, solar or SMR. Sealed SMRs have a wide variety of run times 6-20 years but generally, it's only a portion of the overnight costs.
the overnight costs might be quite a bit lower if we build SMRs on the site of old coal plants which already have steam turbines.
Financing costs on a full-scale reactor rack up insane amounts of interest because the payback doesn't start for a decade.
SMRs deployed in say 5 years at a lower cost save a lot on interest and it might be possible in a few cases to build them loan free.
Thank you so much for this very informative video!
I'm interested in learning more about the different designs of SMRs
Search out the book “Power Hungry” - author BRYCE for additional info
Search for the book “Power Hungry by BRYCE
NOTE: 8 SMR modules from NuScale can desalinate enough water to supply L.A. every day.
The first commercial reactors were small ones. They were replaced by bigger ones which made cheaper electricity.
True, early designs were smaller and then everyone moved to larger to take advantage of the bigger output. I don't think SMRs are trying to compete or directly replace large plants, they're filling more of a rapid response role that can be built more easily.
By using smaller reactors, you can change the economy of scale for manufacturing those reactors. Large reactors would be built across the country if the US government subsidized nuclear like they have "green" energy like wind and solar in recent years. They have spent roughly $500 billion on "climate and green energy" projects in just the last few years. They spent just $100 billion total in the last 70 years on nuclear power subsidies and John Kerry lead the call for shutting down projects like the Integral Fast Reactor at Idaho National Laboratory in 1994 because they claimed it was a waste of money. The Integral Fast Reactor was a proven design that could not melt down even if you shut off all the safety systems and shut all the cooling pumps off. It was designed to be inherently meltdown proof and the design featured a fuel processing facility attached to it that could recycle the same fuel over and over again. The fuel that it started up with would be the same fuel (more or less) that it shuts down with when the plant is retired. It shows the ignorance of our politicians. Waste hundreds of billions covering agricultural land with toxic solar panels that are intermittent energy sources and leave behind land that's polluted with cables, concrete, pipes, insulation, etc.
Start small and work the bugs out. It's true f many things.
Excellent presentation of SMRs
Glad you liked it
Why does it still take 1-2 years to build them in a factory? Is that due to low volume boutique production, regulatory inspections at different production phases, complexity, or what? If the factory were making 500 a year would there still be a 2 year latency from start to completion?
Good question. It would depend on how many were needed to be produced. Boeing can take a high-demand design, like the 737, and make one in about two weeks because the production is streamlined and constant. Lower demand takes more time. Since no one has these factories yet, everything is estimated. So we'll have to see. Cheers!
Even if you can make the reactor in 2 weeks (per the 737 comment), the _plant_ would still need to be built - foundations, structures, turbine installation, switchyards, etc.
So, after (for example) uranium ore has been mined, what plants and money is used to convert it (flourination), enrich it and produce commercial grade nuclear rods, suitable for use? If the uranium ore is crushed, how do the industry players avoid health issues and pollution at the crushing plants? What security is in place to stop terrorists stealing the crushed ore (for dirty bombs) at the start of the cycle?
That’s uranium ore which is 98% U238 which is virtually useless as a dirty bomb.
Great Video, I'd like to hear more about Rolls Royce's version and export potential
I would like to hear more about Blykalla (Lead Cooled) SMR from sweden. :)
Thanks for the suggestion! I haven't heard much about that one so I think it would be fun to look into.
Very well presented and clear. You are a natural.
Small scale fission reactors could be used to provide ignition energy for a fusion reactor.
Usable fusion is 10 to 30 (or more) years away according to the people who have achieved a very short burst of fusion output.
Then there's the problem of how to use the heat produced to produce affordable electricity. Our two most expensive ways of generating electricity involve heat to drive steam turbines. New coal and new nuclear cost multiple times that of wind, solar, and CCNG. The market will only buy what is most affordable.
As a former nuclear engineer, I have to say that SMRs are unfortunately dead on arrival until nuclear regulations are completely scrapped and replaced with regulations that are built around passively ensuring safety during core damage events.
Equally, SMRs are dead on arrival as long as I cannot use ASME Section VIII (conventional pressure vessels) for everything.
The biggest factor to the proliferation of SMRs is the US's control of nuclear fuel. I visited Toshiba's prototype 4S facility in Yokohama and spoke with the senior management. Although a 20 megawatt unit can be produced for $5 million once in mass production, the nuclear fuel could run as high as $80 million because of the IAEA and AEC's control. I envision Russia becoming a major player in this market as they have zero restrictions on the fuel. I suggested to management that Toshiba approach North Korea for fuel but they're afraid of the US's reaction. Again, greed is prohibiting the adoption of game changing energy solutions...
Dude, a mass produced wind turbine costs $4 million. Foe God's sake think before writing. ANYTHING nuclear starts in the billions.
Very well and concisely presented. Thank you. I call attention to the elimination of pumps. That would mean natural convection is crucial for heat transfer. I have patented IP for a new convective heat transfer paradigm. It causes a fluid to impinge heat transfer surfaces without impinging the packing, creating the same ideal pressure drop per superficial meter of travel as no packing at all (no parasitic losses) for a given heat transfer coefficient - but at 10-20% of the velocity as with no packing or impingement. By using a much lower aspect ratio, the inlet-to-outlet distance and pressure drop is reduced 80-90% for the same heat transfer coefficient. We have accurate measurements and manufacturing for a new class of heat exchanger with other benefits. By the way, I developed it for catalytic reactors constrained by heat transfer and pressure drop in the other SMRs (steam methane reformers). Perhaps you or your fans could direct me to help out. THANKS. Jon
forced circulation is used to increase power output. All PWRs can operate under natural circulation but at less than 5% rated power output. You could change designs to increase this but WHY when installing a simple pump solves the problem????
@@clarkkent9080 O thanks, mild-mannered reporter. The UA-cam video mentioned that it was a beneficial for SMRs to not require pumps and rotating equipment because they can fail. I might have misunderstood.
@@jonathanfeinstein6997 The Terrapower Natrium reactors does use pumps. One of the problems with MSR is maintaining the salt molten. Solidified salt in all the piping and components would be a major problem. In any case, lets wait until the Natrium reactor operates for a few years before corporate propaganda can be stated as fact
@@clarkkent9080 That is helpful information. Thanks. I am already in my 70's though. How significant do you think it would be to lower the pressure drop by a factor of about 7 for the same heat transfer coefficient.? Would people jump at that?
@@jonathanfeinstein6997 I worked in the nuclear industry for 40+ years at five different facilities and am also now retired.
I am not sure what you mean by pressure drop.
U.S. PWRs when operating at 100% power, operate very close to the melting point of the fuel cladding.
If you watch a pot of water begin to boil, you will first see small steam bubbles form at the bottom of the pot, then break free and as they rise the steam bubble collapses as it cools. This is a very efficient form of heat transfer as steam contains significantly more energy than hot water.
In a reactor core at 100% power, these steam bubbles are formed on the fuel clad surface and swept away by the forced (pump) coolant flow where they collapse and give up their energy to the coolant (very efficient). Steam is also a good insulator and if they are not swept away from the cladding, it would overheat and melt.
All reactors are designed to keep the core cooled by natural circulation (if the pumps fail) but with a reactor trip when the power output from radioactive decay is less than 5% power.
so plainly put, pumps allow for power levels that are 20 time higher.
I noticed repeatedly you used footage from Rolls Royce SMR during your video but you never mentioned them.
Excellent video. I do wonder why nobody ever mentions the savings that would result from not having to build hundreds of miles of high tension power lines, and their maintenance
?
How about the Department of Defence using SMR at awkward land base sites as they have plenty of money, and experience with nuclear ships, and it would improve logistics?
How about looking at non power based applications such has industrial for high heat from molten salt designs. Germany sure could use these right now!
Thanks for this concise analysis. An additional consideration has arisen in recen months. With the latest developments in warfare, where civilian infrastructure is now considered a legitimate target for cheap drone weapons, a more distributed approach to the provision of all utilities would seem to be a sensible course for the future, especially when combined with your discussion on complementary renewable sources. SMRs seem to fit the spec. for power at least. Perhaps if CHP could be included in the package, for urban installations at least, SMRs would be a sufficiently attractive option.
SMR will be great war targets, yes?
SNR not SMR
@@libearl828 Well, that’s the whole point. Multiple smaller, localised power installations, without vulnerable long distance supply networks would make much harder targets than the current setup, which are highly vulnerable to relatively minor damage, and which take out multiple other utilities, like water, sewage and transport when they go down. They could also be buried and located away from their intended use. Fairly easy to protect from drone attack as well, if needed. Not hard to build in redundancy either, similar to computer storage architecture, but with each unit located a short distance from its cluster.
@@StepDub yeah I want one in my yard... NOT
@@libearl828 depends where you live, I suppose.
The reason small pressurized water reactors are a good idea is that they are inherently safe as Dr Weinberg explained in his 2003 interview. He said, "Below 500MWth, in the case of a sudden shutdown, they can dissipate the heat of nuclear decay passively." Unfortunately, Westinghouse, GE and B&W engineers thought they can build bigger for economy of scale profits and use defence in-depth engineering. That worked as well as the accelerated bridge construction at FIU. Engineer brain block ego is no fun.
I operated many different types of reactors. One, a 1.000 Mw B&W (three Mile Island sister plant) tripped from 100% power when we lost all 4 reactor coolant pumps due to a grid upset. The plant safely kept the reactor passively cool on natural circulation for 1 hour until we investigated and restarted forced cooling.
Every PWR in the U.S. can trip and cooldown on natural circulation but you do need feedwater which is provided by diesel backed electric and steam drive aux feedwater pumps.
The latest AP1000 passive PWR does not need diesels but still need battery power for instrumentation and controls.
As has been publisized, there is interest here in the Philippines...Companys that are looking to expand to other countries now have a reason to contact the government here and talk with them.....From what I have been able to read there are companys like ThorCon and Moltex (yes I saw the comment below) who are really close in development to both shore based and land based plants as well as Rolls Royce who is active in advertizment of their SMR's
Philippines is an interesting case, with the possibility of restarting work in the near future. SMRs could be a good option, so we'll have to see if anything happens.
@@atomicblender
That's a pretty rich solar region. Lots of sunshine to provide inexpensive electricity.
Space travel/propulsion for space craft / stations??
An interesting and different topic. I know there are some very, very small reactors used for those, often with direct energy conversion systems.
Coal-fired units are definitely not always as small as SMRs Each of the units at the Rockport coal power plant were one thousand three hundred megawatts. The largest unit at the John Amos coal power plant is the same size.
Small modular reactors are.......modular. So: if you need more power, add more reactors..
Great video - I'd love to hear more about SMR reactor availability in Africa, and especially countries with lots of need for electricity. In particular, what are the regulatory/proliferation challenges of dropping an SMR in - say - Namibia. Could we see these nations get a stable energy source that's easy on the planet?
Africa. a great place for nuclear materials.
Well,NuScale is prepearing to build SMR's in Romania in near future allso...i unjastand that contracts are already on the go.
I think they signed a letter of intent or memorandum of understanding or similar. Nothing concrete yet, at least from what I've heard, but it changes a lot.
Very informative & well done on video.
I am thankful that nuclear is still being produced & improved.
At the least much more electricity will be needed as more electric vehicles are being produced.
At the best, I can see the day that very small nuclear reactors could directly power not only ships, but even locomotives, large construction equipment & ultimately semi tractors & large trucks.
Would be more efficient than diesel/electric & far more effective & efficient than batteries!
Reality.
This is from the Des Moines Register an concerning the only Small Modular Reactor (SMR) project in the U.S. today. It should be noted that NuScale said this month (Jan/2023) the target price for power from the plant is $89 per megawatt hour, up 53% from the previous estimate of $58 per MW hour
In 2013, the Wall Street firm Lazard estimated that the cost of generating electricity at a new nuclear plant in the United States will be between $86 and $122 per megawatt-hour. Last November, Lazard estimated that the corresponding cost will be between $131 and $204 per megawatt-hour based upon the 4 recent new nuclear projects in the U.S. . During the same eight years, renewables have plummeted in cost, and the 2021 estimates of electricity from newly constructed utility-scale solar and wind plants range between $26 and $50 per megawatt-hour. Nuclear power is simply not economically competitive.
SMRs will be even less competitive. Building and operating SMRs will cost more than large reactors for each unit (megawatt) of generation capacity. A reactor that generates five times as much power will not require five times as much concrete or five times as many workers. This makes electricity from small reactors more expensive; many of the original small reactors built in the United States were financially uncompetitive and shut down early.
The estimated cost of constructing a plant with 600 megawatts of electricity from NuScale SMRs, arguably the design closest to deployment in the United States, was originally advertised as costing $1 billion but upon requesting actual bids from engineering firms, increased to $6.1 billion in 2020. Given inflation and other cost constraints that cost today can only be expected to be significantly higher.
The cost was so high that ten members of Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems canceled their contracts. NuScale then changed its proposed plant configuration to 6 fewer reactors but increased each reactor output from 50 Mw to 77 Mw costing at total of $5.3 billion. The NRC just last week approved the construction of the 50 Mw design but now will have to start the review process all over given the switch to a 77 Mw design. For each kilowatt of electrical generation capacity, that estimate is around 80% more than the per-kilowatt cost of the Vogtle project in Georgia - before its cost exploded from $14 billion to over $30 billion. Based on the historical experience with nuclear reactor construction, SMRs are very likely to cost much more than initially expected. And they now have delayed the project start until 2025 in an attempt to find more backers. All this before the inevitable setbacks that will occur once construction starts.
The recent announcement from the US on fusion breakthroughs pretty much puts an end to nuclear which has too many difficulties associated with it.
Isn't fusion nuclear energy? Doesn't fusion have vast difficulties to overcome which will take 25 years to work out? Don't all worthwhile endeavors of mankind have great difficulties to overcome? We only have one working fusion power reactor and it doesn't work at night.
@@daniellarson3068 it's a different kind of nuclear it doesn't create nuclear waste or have the potential for a major disaster. It has recently been proven to work on a small scale by the US researchers but will take a decade or more to scale up to size so yes we need a bridge fuel to get us there we have that in oil and natural gas with the infrastructure and technology already in place. I can't see a lot of R&D investment going into new types of standard nuclear reactors at this point
@@MikeSmith-cl4ix The thing is that it has been a joke that fusion is just 25 years away since the 1950s. I think that joke is still valid. It makes no sense to jettison the most viable solution to the global warming issue, nuclear fission, in the faith that nuclear fusion will be developed on a timetable. It also makes no sense to stick with fossil fuels until that day arrives. Let's get some of these generation IV small modular reactors built and they will tie us over however long it takes until fusion or geothermal energy can do the job.
@@daniellarson3068 yeah I felt the same way but did you see the announcement they made a couple of days ago they used around 190 lasers aimed at a small capsule of fuel and produced 1/3 more energy than was put into it. That proves it works now they just have to scale it up. I don't have a problem with people investing in nuclear fission reactors if they want to I just think they're going to have a hard time finding someone that wants to. Though we shouldn't abandon any type of energy in the unlikely event there's a problem scaling it up. It's a national security issue we would be fools to get rid of oil and gas or nuclear until we have something working 100% to replace it.
Hi i'm really happy you made a video comparing them. 👍 i'd really like it if you compared the ones from GeHitachi, nuscale, terrapower, rollsroyce and toshiba.
Thanks for the feedback, I'd like to as well and will try to in a future video.
I think it was the 1980s there was a lot of talk about the French developing small modular reactor then there was radio silence about it.
A couple of the selling points I remember were : they were relatively inexpensive compared to conventional nuke plants, they could be built almost anywhere, they were inherently stable and they didn't contain enough fissile material to cause a Chernobyl or be repurposed for weapons.
I always wondered whatever became of that.
There's been an on-and-off again interest in SMRs (even if they weren't always called that). The difference this time around, I think, is that there are a lot of companies and governments pushing for new technologies. I'm not sure either what happened to the previous French attempts... Cheers!
It was all wishful thinking at best but probably promotional lies. The driving force behind the nuclear industry has always been WAR. Britain effectively gave all of its' advanced nuclear research to the Americans in 1940-1941 to aid the Manhattan Project and then, using a piece of spurious legislation the Americans refused to share the results with Britain even though the A-bomb would have taken at least another 2 to 3 years without that British knowledge and expertise and cost in the region of 2-3 million more American lives with Japanese suicide fighters contesting every square inch. The American military then proceeded to make a terrible mess in the Western USA contaminating 10s of thousands of square miles as well as evicting newly "liberated" islanders from their homes in the Western Pacific and then making a terrible mess there.
Denied access to results of their own work, megalomaniacs in Britain duplicated all that the Americans were keeping to themselves and made a terrible mess in Australia and the Indian Ocean. The fireworks in the Pacific and Indian Oceans were a bit too bright to remain unnoticed by the Soviets who made a terrible mess in Central Asia with vast areas of modern day Kazakhstan dangerously contaminated. ...... The insufferably pompous General Charles de Gaulle believing that France was entitled to no less than the others put
the French bomb programme on steroids when he became president of France in 1958.
We, therefore, had the four founding members of the United Nations all developing the World's one and only weapon of truly MASS destruction and then magicking up a treaty and intimidating almost all other sates to sign it forbidding them from doing anything on the nuclear front without the big four's permission. This has not stopped the Satanic Theocracy in Palestine from building nuclear weapons at Dimona leading to the Egyptians threatening that they were going to have a go. China declared that threats from the big 4 were paper tigers and they would make bombs if they wanted ..... and then there is North Korea. ..... and India ...... and Pakistan. The first four were, of course, streets ahead. The Soviets didn't give two hoots about what anyone else thought but Britain, France and the USA have tried to cloak their military nuclear developments by developing nuclear power stations and thereby trapping the electricity consumer in those countries into half paying for the military programme.
If you want to know the true cost of "modular" reactors, just delve into Duonreay on the North Coast of Scotland. There were 5 reactors in total, 3 belonging to the Royal Navy, then 2 others, supposedly civil. One was a small research reactor and the last of the five was the World's first operational civil "fast-breeder". This is the only one that had provided any electricity. Mile after mile of ugly pylons were erected, festooned in ugly transmission lines across wilderness. The thing proved to be totally unreliable and was closed down. Initial estimate to decommission the site was set at £2,000 million. This has now climbed to £9,000 million and is still climbing. £9,000 million is £300 on average for every household in the UK. We keep hearing about liquid sodium being used as the transfer medium on some of these new reactors. WELL ! They used sodium on the fast-breeder. The sodium ate through one inch thick stainless steel pipes time after time and was the major cause of the unreliability of the reactor. They have drained it down into something like barrels but they still have approximately 1,600 tons of highly radio-active and highly reactive liquid sodium which has to be decanted into new containers from time to time because it devours everything they have tried. There is heavy security at the site, armed military, armed police officers etc and this will have to be maintained for hundreds of years. THAT IS THE COST OF SMALL MODULAR REACTORS. Every one a ticking Chernobyl or Fukushima.
Those promoting the nuclear industry are naughty boys playing wjth matches behind the bicycle sheds. They will tell any lie. Every now and again they are careless. Not only do they burn down the whole school but a huge area around it as well.
@@terryhoath1983 More like fear of war.
Only 2 nuclear weapons have ever been used in war.
@@MichaelClark-uw7ex The military ambition has always been WAR, not fear of it. In 1945, the Americans only got to drop 2 bombs and were very disappointed. Why did they pick Hiroshima and Nagasaki ? It is easy to explain Hiroshima, it was the main base of Mitsubishi but Nagasaki, the original foothold and, in 1945, the greatest concentration of Christians in Japan ? NO ! These two places were a long, long way from anywhere. It would take a long time, it was hoped before the warmongers in Tokyo would understand. This would give the Americans the opportunity to carry out at least one and possibly TWO more nuclear experiments before in dawned on those in Tokyo that the game was up.. The Americans nuclear cabal were horrified when the Emperor made his announcement on the radio.
There were those who argued that the Japanese be allowed to send a delegation to America to see a bomb test but the hawks wanted to see real life experiments. The alternative was to send a message to Japan that the Japanese leadership may profit from looking to the East wearing dark glasses for the next hour and then Paul Tibbetts and his crew could have off-loaded their bomb about 50 miles out to sea. There was no reason to tell the Japs what to expect so that if it had failed, the Japs would have been mystified as the bomb would have suck down into some of the deepest sea in the World, but if it had worked as it did over Hiroshima, the Japanese leadership would have seen the effect and understood immediately. and the death toll might have been a few thousand who had the misfortune to be out on the sea in the target area but that is many times fewer than the 75,000 people who died immediately at Hiroshima, over 7,000 of them innocents under the age of 5. Many more died in the aftermath. That death toll was repeated at Nagasaki.
Nuclear weapons have not stopped war. Every day of every month of every year since the dropping of the Hiroshima bomb, the World has been at war. Among many others, allow me to highlight a few of those that have hit the headlines,
Korea,
The Malay emergency,
The French in Indochina,
Tibet,
The Suez Canal débâcle
The appalling war of aggression by the Americans against the people of Vietnam,
Katanga,
The invasion of the Falklands by the Argentinian Junta,
Angola,
Various wars in South and Central American, almost all of which have been funded by New York business interests.
Continuous war in Afghanistan since 1979,
Yemen,
Repeated wars of aggression upon the native people of Palestine and surrounding countries by the Satanic Theocracy,
on and on and on .......................... and now UKRAINE !
The AtomicBlender, in this and other of his videos gives some disadvantages of nuclear power in order to appear dispassionate, when at heart, he is a nuclear megalomaniac. An awful lot of people are taken in by this very slick and well funded Göbbelism. "If you tell a lie often enough, people will believe it." My reply was to a contributor who asked a very good question. What DID happen to all those French lies ? I pointed out the facts about waste. The cost of dealing with waste makes any further development of nuclear power to be lunacy. Many small reactors dotted around the countryside simply multiplies the security cost necessary to stop terrorists from getting access to the any one of these multitude of sites FOR HUNDREDS OF YEARS.
On 30 January 1933, the occasion of Hitler's appointment as Chancellor by President Hindenburg, Erich Ludendorff allegedly sent a telegram to Hindenburg (in German, you understand). The oft quoted part is :
"I solemnly prophesy that this accursed man will cast our Reich into the abyss and bring our nation to inconceivable misery."
Far more menacing and significant is what followed,
"Future generations will damn you in your grave for what you have done"
So it is. Future generations will damn the nuclear megalomaniacs AND WILL DAMN US FOR NOT STOPPING THEM !!!
@@terryhoath1983 You're view on history is highly skewed.
Humans have been at war since there have been humans, it isn't something new that only appeared after the invention of the nuclear bomb.
Well done presentation explaining why we aren't seeing SMRs popping up all over the place. Seems to just a matter of time till the bugs are worked out and the cost and efficiency is in line with other energy production. Wind and solar just ain't going to cut it. Not alone anyway. They will have a place. All forms of energy production must be considered. For the time being, fossil fuels will be needed for some time yet. I have some doubt net zero can be achieved by 2050. Nor am I convinced it's even necessary.
Also need to consider copper connectivity
would like to know more about the Rolls Royce SMR